Reviews The inverse of the formidable power of movies to surprise, vex, confound, titillate and excite us lies in their capacity to disappoint. We know enough about the tricks, the history, genre and all the rest to have arrived at expectations. We have seen what can be done on the big screen and know what […]
John J. Bennett
Posted inArts + Scene
Squad Goals
Reviews HARLEY QUINN: BIRDS OF PREY. Gratitude is … a good thing, right? Of course it is. And we should probably count ourselves grateful. Because even as the facade of American democracy continues to crumble, as we trudge ever closer toward totalitarianism, destitution and disarray, as winter drags on and tyrants grow more empowered and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Tough Guy Act
Reviews THE GENTLEMEN. In case anybody was wondering, Guy Ritchie — when not occupied with middling, sometimes incomprehensibly conceived blockbusters (Sherlock Holmes and its sequel A Game of Shadows, 2009 and 2011; The Man from UNCLE, 2015; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, 2017; Aladdin, 2019) — apparently still feels compelled to return to the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Virtues of Just Mercy
Reviews JUST MERCY. While Just Mercy, the latest from director and co-writer Destin Daniel Crettin (Short Term 12, 2013; The Glass Castle, 2017), adapting Bryan Stevenson’s memoir with Andrew Lanham, belongs in the Important column, it arrives without self-generated fanfare or grandstanding. It builds a case for its own significance with quietly confident style, heartfelt […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Grudge isn’t Worth Holding Onto
Reviews THE GRUDGE. Having emerged from what has disconcertingly become a New Year’s tradition of spending the holiday and the week bracketing it, sick abed, I recoiled, mole-like, from an atypically gorgeous January day. There had been rain overnight but it had given way to the sort of limitless cerulean horizon people rush out to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Diamonds in the Rough
Reviews UNCUT GEMS. New York City represents much of what is fascinating, romantic and terrible about the American experiment. At least to a soft, rural-raised Left Coast boy, the city is all teeth, knives and broken glass, scrutiny and anonymity at once — paranoia as landscape. And the brothers Safdie, Benny and Josh, have recently […]
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End of Empire
Reviews STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. A friend recently referred to me as the Star Wars Grinch — for the sake of full transparency, he said it in a text and called me both a “gronch” and a grinch — which is earned and fair, if not entirely accurate. This was in response, after […]
Posted inArts + Scene
No Good Deed
Reviews 6UNDERGROUND. More than six years ago, I reviewed Pain & Gain (2013) and, in so doing, established that I will not, whether out of actual enjoyment or simple contrarianism, participate in the popular wholesale condemnation of Michael Bay movies. I find much of his work arch and unenjoyable, but there are simple pleasures in […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Long Goodbyes
Reviews THE IRISHMAN. This is not exactly a new release. But as art and entertainment now live deathlessly — like identity, real or manufactured, and all of our malfeasance and misadventure — in the digital ether, I’m not too worried about it. Nor do I find it bothersome that the movie’s Netflix release might somehow […]
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Buckle Up
Reviews FORD VS. FERRARI. Motorsport in the middle 1960s stood on the precipice of change: still hewing to its daredevil origins, it remained delicate and brutal, homebuilt and homicidal. It was a time when a little upstart car company off the beach of Los Angeles, helmed by a former world-class racing driver turned failed chicken […]
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Doctor Sleep’s Diminishing Returns
Reviews DOCTOR SLEEP. Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s version of his novel The Shining (book 1977, movie 1980). It’s not my place to say he’s wrong but … he is. While Kubrick’s is a liberal adaptation, therein lies the whole damn point. Books are not movies, nor the reverse, and this business of simply […]
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All Hail
Reviews DOLEMITE IS MY NAME. To fans who identify Eddie Murphy by his early movies — 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Coming To America (1988) — and/or his legendary if, in hindsight, occasionally lamentable stand-up specials Delirious (1983) and Raw (1987), and his run on Saturday Night Live (1980-84), […]