One Battle After Another ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. For geeks of a certain age and inclination, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie has been — and hopefully always will be — an occasion for tremendous excitement. We’ve been down since Hard Eight (1996) — which should rightfully be titled Sydney but that’s a diatribe for […]
Screens
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A Big Bold Beautiful Journey Pays Off
A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY. Coming so soon after Splitsville and my rapturous reception thereof, this one might seem like something of a non-starter. It is, after all, high romantic fantasy in a decidedly old-fashioned vein. A meet-cute expanded into a could-be/never-was trip down the varyingly painful lanes of memory, it plays a little like […]
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Demons Out!
The Conjuring: Last Rites THE CONJURING: LAST RITES. Since The Conjuring premiered in 2013, director/producer James Wan’s extended horror universe has been a reliable source of scares. Real-life (though less credibly real) paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren have served as a well of exploits from which to draw, with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga […]
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Splitsville
SPLITSVILLE. In the period of relatively blissful ignorance before the plague years and the insurrection and all of that, there was a little movie called The Climb (2019), which was much buzzed about in certain movie nerd sectors. Sadly, it became one of many casualties of the closure of theaters and the rush to transition […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Return to Messy Heroes
CAUGHT STEALING. For a quarter century (give or take) Darren Aronofsky has had me chasing the dragon of what he can do. The challenge inherent in this, of course, is that the thing I want him to do, what I see as his high-water mark, rarely coincides with what he wants to do. Requiem for […]
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Greed and Getaways
RELAY. A hundred years ago, in 2016, David Mackenzie directed Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay Hell or High Water. That story, set against and amongst the devastation wrought by the 2008 collapse of the criminally exploitative American mortgage securities racket, is about individual desperation in the face of remorseless corporate greed. It is also a thrilling heist/pursuit […]
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Night Always Comes
NIGHT ALWAYS COMES. Since 2007, Willy Vlautin has been publishing novels about the new American West, which means he specializes in stories about life at the end of empire, lives lived in the absence of opportunity and the presence of addiction, poverty and the occasional fleeting opportunity. The books draw a taut line between Reno […]
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The Dreamy Terror of Weapons
WEAPONS. There is a moment in the highly anticipated horror movie Weapons when Josh Brolin, playing a distraught father asleep in the bedroom of his missing son, wanders in a weird, mysterious dream that claws at his grief and ends with a grotesque shock that jolts him awake. Scrambling at the covers, he shouts, “What […]
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Happy Again
HAPPY GILMORE 2. One of the many pitfalls inherent in what the movie-internet has queasily dubbed “legasequels” (we’ll plumb that odious cave another time), is that they must, by their very nature, provide fan-service while also reflecting, or at least acknowledging, the fact that time may have left those fans behind. At the very least, […]
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The Superman of Our Time
SUPERMAN. As a kid, I imprinted on Christopher Reeve’s Superman like a baby chick. And when, in my 20s, I saw him in a trench coat on a Metro North train, tossing a patient if perfunctory grin at a drunk shouting, “Superman!” across the car, my attachment felt vindicated. Whether David Corenswet carries the mantle […]
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Cronenberg in The Shrouds
THE SHROUDS. It’s a fascinating thing, having spent the better part of a lifetime with the work of revered artists, to watch them age in the weird, liminal space of their output. In the past, they would often end up back at the bottom tier of an industry that no longer had a use for […]
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Back in the Fight for The Old Guard 2
THE OLD GUARD 2. Recent rewatching of 1980s American action movies (don’t judge me — we all have demons) had reminded me how little we moviegoers once expected. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bulk (sub-Marvel on today’s market) and enough uninterrupted gunfire to become its own variety of white noise was enough for action movie fans to give […]