(October 22, 2020)
THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR. As I looked up the offerings for this week, I knew The Trial of the Chicago Seven, the Aaron Sorkin drama about the courtroom aftermath...
(October 15, 2020)
I 'd say I'm fairly neutral, as far as Halloween goes. I don't particularly like or dislike costumery. The proliferation of candy is fine, if eventually problematic — I'm thinking...
(October 8, 2020)
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD. Netflix, as both bellwether and arbiter of contemporary taste, has long led the drive to popularize and, at least to some extent, legitimize documentary movies in...
(October 1, 2020)
AVA. There is certain cold, maybe sick comfort in watching a new, distinctly middle-of-the-road American action movie with an incidental plot and almost interchangeable heroes and villains. It helps to...
(September 24, 2020)
THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME. This country has long suffered from an identity crisis — 2020 has turned it into an outright catastrophe but it was a pre-existing condition going...
(September 17, 2020)
COASTAL ELITES. Maybe this will be the one, among many little-read movie columns in a left-leaning but ultimately centrist alternative weekly newspaper from the charred western slope of the former...
(September 10, 2020)
I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS. There was a moment, oh, 20 years ago or so, when it seemed like Charlie Kaufman was unstoppable. It was a weird confluence, with the...
(September 3, 2020)
As much as this is a column regarding the charming third installment in a remarkably — shockingly — long-legged franchise, it is also very much not a column about Unhinged...
(August 27, 2020)
SHE DIES TOMORROW. The plague has gone on long enough by now that we are beginning to experience the first wave of art and entertainment produced during and in reaction...
(August 20, 2020)
PROJECT POWER. A friend, whose name shall remain unsaid but which once appeared on this very masthead, wondered not long ago, whither Jamie Foxx. I bristled a bit at the...
(August 13, 2020)
THE TAX COLLECTOR. Like James Ellroy (whose work I also consume with probably unhealthy compulsion), writer/director David Ayer has spent two decades unpacking and examining the lives of men at...
(August 6, 2020)
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS. To me, rural Pennsylvania has never seemed especially welcoming, even on its best day. And slushy winter, 17, pregnant and getting catcalled while trying to perform...
(July 30, 2020)
THE ASSISTANT. Jane (Julia Garner) is often just trying to eat. Arriving at the office in the dismal Manhattan pre-dawn, she finally gets a second to wolf down a bowl...
A documentary portrait of civil rights giant John Lewis
(July 23, 2020)
JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. A friend at work turned to me yesterday, unprompted, and said "Well, are you ready to become a martyr in the second American revolution?" He asked...
(July 9, 2020)
7500. In the first review I ever published in this vaunted publication — years before the collapse — I wrote of Shia LaBeouf that I would "rather watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt...
Eurovision Song Contest, Irrisistible and Balle Perdu
(July 2, 2020)
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: THE STORY OF FIRE SAGA. Sometimes — almost always, these days — comedy feels like the only chance we've got. Not as escapism, really, but as a...
