(June 4, 2020)
CIRCUS OF BOOKS. Even owning a prominent gay-porn bookstore and social hub is, at the end of the day, just a job. So goes one object lesson from Rachel Mason's...
(May 28, 2020)
THE LOVEBIRDS. There's a lot to unpack here, both in terms of the movie itself and pandemic-related shifts in the industry. I'll briefly address the latter before belaboring the former....
(May 21, 2020)
ARKANSAS. Clark Duke first registered on my radar in 2010, when Kick-Ass and Hot Tub Time Machine were released (both classics, incidentally). With his self-aware charm, wry delivery and beyond-adroit...
(May 14, 2020)
In its ongoing re-creation and refinement of the history of movie production and distribution, Netflix has leaned heavily on documentaries. Especially in the early days, when nine-figure budgets and international...
(March 12, 2020)
Reviews THE WAY BACK. A friend asked, after initially mistaking it for The Way Way Back (2013), if this is "that remake of Hoosiers." It's neither but fair enough for...
(March 5, 2020)
Reviews THE INVISIBLE MAN. When news filtered down that Universal Pictures had big plans to reach back into its rich history and recast itself as the home of the monsters,...
(February 27, 2020)
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...
(February 20, 2020)
Reviews THE PHOTOGRAPH. The story is based on love and romance, as its Feb. 14 release date might suggest, but The Photograph, written and directed by Stella Meghie, takes a...
(February 13, 2020)
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...
(February 6, 2020)
Reviews GRETEL AND HANSEL. There is much to be mined in Western fairy tales but few are as adaptable to horror as Hansel and Gretel as set down by the...
(January 30, 2020)
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...
(January 23, 2020)
Reviews VIRGIN RIVER. Last week I treated myself to a deep dive into the roiling drama of the Romance Writers of America, a professional organization undergoing a page-turner of...
(January 16, 2020)
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,...
(January 9, 2020)
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...
(January 2, 2020)
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...
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Bombshell and Cats
(December 26, 2019)
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...
