John J. Bennett

FENCES. I usually approach theater with trepidation, not for any particular dislike of the medium or the material or the setting, but because I more often than not find myself mortified on behalf of the actors. I don’t judge them for their decisions or missteps. Rather, I over-empathize, assuming that their misreading of the material, […]

A simple, unwritten rule of this organization holds that a “request” from the editor shall not go un-granted. For the uninitiated, the editor is a fearsome figure: “dictate” or “directive” or “command one would use in training a canine” might be more accurate in context. So when word came down that the editor would like/insists […]

Reviews ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. An unpleasant combination of factors still leaves me feeling ambivalent about The Force Awakens, even all these months later: the vast and vapid pre-hype; Disney’s marketing push penetrating every sector of consumer culture; the lingering memory of the first round of prequels, then of the re-touched, re-released (it […]

OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY. In the early going, I had reason to be optimistic, albeit cautiously, that this might join the ranks of the Christmas movie canon. It seemed to be subtly stealing all the right elements from some true classics: Chicago setting and bonuses at risk from Christmas Vacation, office setting gone wrong from Die […]

Reviews The only things kicking off at the movie house this past weekend were Incarnate and Believe, the former about a scientist inhabiting the mind of a boy possessed by a demon, the latter about faith and a Christmas pageant prevailing in difficult economic times. Granted, I’ve been an advocate for both horror and Christmas […]

Reviews ALLIED. Writer/director/producer/industry titan Robert Zemeckis works … a lot. Perhaps because he is so prolific, I’ve long found his catalog to be a little uneven. From the beginning of his career more than four decades ago, one has had to contend with, say, a 1941 (1979) — to his credit, he wrote but did […]

Reviews FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM. I suppose if I felt any sort of connection to, or even interest in, the universe of Harry Potter, I might have approached this with more enthusiasm. But even having neutral feelings about the whole affair, I was distracted and bored throughout, and left disappointed. I took […]

Reviews ARRIVAL. As we watched last week’s events cut through the ice floe of our national conversation about class and race — about disparity in general — and as they opened a hideous, yawning chasm further dividing us, churning up in their wake misunderstanding, hatred and fear, I felt deeply and unexpectedly despondent. Anxiety, frustration […]

Reviews INFERNO. Lacking any connection to, experience with or substantive prior knowledge of the works of novelist Dan Brown, including the two prior cinematic adaptations in this series, The DaVinci Code (2006) and Angels and Demons (2009), my preconceptions about Inferno were founded on the canon of director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks. They […]

Reviews AMERICAN HONEY. In this case it’s difficult to separate my staid and cynical self from the open, curious one. The former looks at this movie as a bigger, louder take on the same themes as Kids (1995): a decades-older artist’s peek through the keyhole of disenfranchised youth culture, designed to freak out the squares. […]

Reviews THE ACCOUNTANT. Director Gavin O’Connor has been grinding it out now for almost two decades. He made some waves in the burgeoning ’90s indie boom without ever becoming a Big Name Director. His film Warrior (2011), a fight movie with more grit and a wider emotional vocabulary than most prestige dramas, caught my attention. […]

Reviews DEEPWATER HORIZON. It feels like yesterday when director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg collaborated on Lone Survivor (2013). This is due as much to the punishing, visceral immediacy of that movie as to the fact that 2013 wasn’t really all that long ago, and here the boys are again with an even larger […]