John J. Bennett

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 […]

Reviews THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. As my wife sometimes gleefully points out, I spent my early youth enchanted by the trappings of cowboy culture. Given the choice, I would almost invariably dress myself in a hat, boots (spurs, even!), jeans and vest, with a toy gun-belt as embellishment. It’s all terribly gender normative and regressive and […]

Reviews BLAIR WITCH. Being of a certain age, I remember the media blitz surrounding The Blair Witch Project (1999): the ambiguous print ads and teasers, the early Internet presence, the promise of the scariest movie of all time, assembled from footage shot by young documentarians now lost. It was all bullshit, of course, but we […]

Reviews SULLY. Clint Eastwood has been directing movies for 45 years now, acting in them (less frequently, of late) for more than 60, and it shows. As much as his reverence/obsession with American heroism can occasionally obscure the fact, he knows how to tell a story on screen. American Sniper (2014) waved the flag a […]

Reviews DON’T BREATHE. Director Fede Alvarez weathered the gaze of my red, watery eye when he remade Evil Dead (2013), surpassing my low expectations with skill, imagination and reverence for the source material. I wouldn’t have called myself a horror fan then (I’ve since come to terms), but Alvarez and his talented young cast overcame […]

Reviews JASON BOURNE. Bourne (Matt Damon), who spent most of the 14 years since we met him (The Bourne Identity, 2002) trying to reconstruct his pre-CIA past, has by now given himself over to semi-therapeutic, non-lethal violence. On the Greek-Albanian border, he dominates bare-knuckle boxing matches in refugee camps. Then he holes up in squalid […]

Reviews LIGHTS OUT. I have become a victim of my own scant optimism. Among horror movies, the ratio of bad to good remains dishearteningly high; higher, perhaps, than in any other single genre. I was never much of a fan to begin with, save a few notable outliers. In recent years, though, as the volume […]

Reviews Ghostbusters. I would love to write an impassioned defense of the new Ghostbusters. I would find it deeply satisfying, both as a fan of the original and as a person who, hating few things in this world, passionately hates misogynistic Internet trolls. But there are mitigating factors, first and foremost: the movie itself. The […]

Reviews Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. As I’ve said time and time again, R-rated comedy is a risky genre. Banking on the strength or audacity of the material, it forsakes all the families and summer-break teenagers who seem to be the primary drivers of the movie industry. And because awards shows are myopic and […]