BLACK PANTHER
Like adults who read Harry Potter books as if they aren’t children’s books written on a sixth grade reading level,…
Film Reviews
GAME NIGHT
“Game Night” is a dark, not black, comedy that taps into modern American fears regarding guns, imposters, and sudden violence.…
THE YAKUZA — CLASSIC FILM PICK
Robert Mitchum was in his stride when he made “The Yakuza,” doing a movie every year and making it look…
PHANTOM THREAD
“Phantom Thread” is nothing that it pretends. It is considered a cardinal sin for an actor to break character, and…
DARKEST HOUR
“Darkest Hour” is a brief, and presumably misleading, biopic aimed more at winning awards for acting than in connecting our…
LADY BIRD — REVISITED
Coming-of-Age, Corporate Corruption, Film Reviews, Hollywood, Social Satire, Video Essay, Women Filmmakers, Women's Cinema, ZERO STARS
Lady Bird is a KAREN. The fact is indisputable and undeniable. Racist, homophobic, lazy, petty, selfish, sociopathic, disloyal, and dishonest,…
THE SHAPE OF WATER
The five years that Guillermo Del Toro spent writing and developing “The Shape of Water” (with co-writer Vanessa Taylor) pays…
LOGAN
If indoctrinating child audiences into accepting, and enjoying, brutal deadly violence was the intent of the filmmakers responsible for making…
I, TONYA
Craig Gillespie, the Australian director behind the great magical realist film “Lars and the Real Girl” (from 2007) is destined…
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
The title “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” sounds like an oh-so-earnest independent movie based on [ostensibly] real life events that…
THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER
Lanthamos’s film’s all begin with a promising high-concept first act that crumbles into an unrecognizable pile of filmic detritus by…
I LOVE YOU, DADDY
Louis C.K.’s filmic send up of Woody Allen’s films, and [offhandedly] Allen’s reputation as a pedophile, would have been a…
SUBURBICON
The cracks in America’s longstanding patriarchal methods of intimidation and theft of life and dignity are igniting a volcanic reaction.…
LAST FLAG FLYING — NYFF 55
You’d be hard-pressed to imagine a more inept movie, much less one coming from the pedigree that this one does.…
THE SQUARE — CANNES 2017
“The Square” fails as a social satire because Östlund isn’t capable of completing any of his slow-moving trains of thought.…
BLADE RUNNER 2049
All spectacle and no substance describes Denis Villeneuve’s predictably overwrought yet lightweight sci-fi snoozefest. Even Ryan Gosling comes across as…
mother!
Darren Aronofsky cribs liberally from the Old Testament for allegorical inspiration toward a mind-blowing social satire disguised as a psychological…
RUDE BOY
However fraught with controversy, “Rude Boy” is a priceless document of one of the greatest Punk bands in history. This…
IT
The direction, editing, pacing, and tone are so off in director Andy Muschietti’s filmic adaptation of Stephen King’s child-led psychodrama…
WIND RIVER
Writer-director Taylor Sheridan (the screenwriter on last year’s “Hell or High Water”) draws first-blood during a year of failed American…
COLE SMITHEY’S CLASSIC CINEMA
