Older Films

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

Moviegoers of 2019 have become familiar with the phrase “Part of the journey is the end” through that really popular superhero movie you may have seen. Something similar to that now-famous truism presents itself through the latest Ted Bundy film. In the case of the Bundy film, the lesson learned is that the end often justifies the […]
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

I have a strange history with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. When the first film came out in the summer of 2014, I was completely taken in by it and willfully ignored the friends who told me it was bad – until I watched it one time too many and veritable scales fell from my […]
Iron Man Three

As the fishes above attest, this is not going to be a grand apology for an overlooked masterpiece. I am merely offering a few modest words on a film’s modest merits. In the rush of Marvel movies released since its premiere in 2013, Shane Black’s Iron Man Three has largely been forgotten – a victim […]
The Conjuring 2

The message that emerges from The Conjuring 2 is simply this: home is where the father is. More pointedly, home is where the faithful father is. The Hodgsons are a family with no father, and their lives are objectively and demonstrably the worse for it. Their biological father’s abandonment left the family exposed – exposed to grinding poverty, the stresses that accompany it, and bullies of all sorts. Ed reverses this trend, restoring function, hope, and faith to the home. Conversely, when Ed is eventually driven from the home through deception, the Hodgson family crumbles – emotionally and in terms of their safety.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the sophomore film of director Michel Gondry, has a flawless screenplay. Its tale is one of a shy man named Joel (an inoffensive Jim Carrey) and a girl he falls in love with after meeting her at a train station in Montauk, a girl by the name of Clementine […]
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

It’s a well-known fact: the cinematic year of 2007 was one for the ages. Those fortunate enough to live through it remember the year fondly; those who, like myself, thrived at that point on a steady diet of Veggie Tales and Disney’s Homeward Bound, admire it from afar in wistful retrospect. In perhaps the best […]
The Kid Who Would be King

The inexplicably long-titled The Kid Who Would be King (was there no easier alternative?) opened at the end of January this year without any fanfare from 20th Century Fox. It’s no surprise that the film sunk like a stone at the box office. The marketing campaign just wasn’t appealing, there’ve been countless films about Arthurian legend, and, worst […]
Miller’s Crossing

“You always take the long way around to get what you want, don’t you, Tom?” asks Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) about halfway through Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers’ third feature. Tom (Gabriel Byrne), the closest thing the film has to a hero, only replies: “What did I want?” Like their leading man, the Coens tend to take the long way around, and most of the time, viewers come away from their films wondering what they wanted.
Sorcerer

There are two extremes when it comes to film criticism: Romance and Reason. Those of a leftist temperament almost always veer too far into emotional fancy; those of the right tend to get bogged down with intellectual analysis. The truth is that film, like most forms of media, is a rough and ready mixture of […]
Split

Whether you love him or hate him, you simply cannot deny that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is a singular voice, something of increasing rarity in modern American cinema. Once celebrated, there was a dark period for Shyamalan where his name elicited groans rather than excitement from the general public. In some ways, that’s unfair, since […]
BlacKkKlansman

Back in the summer of 1989, Spike Lee lit a joint that critics said was sure to cause riots and incite anger among young African American males. With a boombox in its hand and a “fight the power!” on its lips, the director’s third feature film polarized audiences, with some hailing it as one of […]
Vox Lux

“That’s the thing about pop music,” a young Celeste muses, “I don’t want people to have to think too hard, I just want them to feel good.” And yet, that line of thinking is a trap, a great deception that allows the artist to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes. Young Celeste, after all, […]
It’s a Wonderful Life

Scrooge’s nephew calls Christmas “a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the […]
The Other Side of the Wind

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” – Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time “A fact of life: […]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Half-Blood Prince is the first, and perhaps only, Harry Potter film to feel like it isn’t trying to be a good “Harry Potter film” and just does its best at being a good film. The seventh film has a similar tone, and Azkaban encapsulates what it is to be a Harry Potter film the best, but my point stands. In the sixth cinematic installment of the franchise, Harry Potter and his friends are ordinary British teens placed in extraordinary circumstances, but instead of focusing on the circumstances, the film chooses to focus on the teens – and is much better off because of it.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

In the evangelical circles of my childhood, Harry Potter was anathema; when I was allowed to read the books in high school, they still carried the sense of something forbidden about them, though by the time I reached college, J.K. Rowling was suddenly accorded the reverence due a long-lost member of the Inklings. Suffice it […]
Let the Right One In

Early in Let the Right One In, a young bully asks his victim, “What are you looking at?” Soon we find the victim, a dispassionate boy named Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), fantasizing about turning the question back on his tormentor. His rehearsed vengeance is overheard by the vampire Eli (Lina Leandersson), and well into her courtship […]
Interpreting ‘The Shape’ of Halloween

Originally conceived as The Babysitter Murders, the plot for Halloween is actually about as streamlined as that title might suggest. It features several babysitters, a hulking man with a knife, and some murders. But in the hands of any director other than John Carpenter, we wouldn’t still be talking about Halloween forty years later. It is, in fact, one of […]
Barton Fink: The Inferno and the Hypocrite

Writer’s block is hell. You sit, every member of your body frozen, your neurons refusing to fire, your fingers refusing to type — and all the while, the awful blankness of the empty page declines to cease its sneering taunt. You lose sleep, lose sanity; your mind becomes a barren desert, a dry and weary […]
Memento: Truth vs. Happiness

After seeing Inception for the first time in the summer of 2010, Christopher Nolan quickly became my favorite director. Although my enthusiasm has waned over the years, as his films have grown less character driven and more spectacle oriented, I still have a certain fondness for earlier works like Memento.