(September 21, 2023)
A HAUNTING IN VENICE. I am both an Agatha Christie fan and philistine, coming to her stories second hand, via my mother's avid reading and BBC productions. Drinking tea with...
(September 14, 2023)
THE NUN II. I would like to begin by acknowledging mistakes were made. Calendar editor Kali Cozyris and I giddily planned a trip to the movies as soon as we...
(September 7, 2023)
MOTHER'S DAY. In my zeal for streaming action movies out of Asia, I may have slept on Poland. The first five minutes of Mateusz Rakowicz's Dzien Matki, as it's...
(August 31, 2023)
GRAN TURISMO. How does one approach a project such as this one, for all intents and purposes a feature length advertisement for the Gran Turismo game (sorry, simulator) franchise, Playstation/Sony...
(August 24, 2023)
THE YOUTUBE EFFECT. As a Luddite, my contact with YouTube is infrequent, shallow and glancing: the occasional how-to, stand-up specials, squinty-eyed late-night music video ping-pong sessions, that's about it. Living...
(August 17, 2023)
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER. Before the title character in Bram Stoker's 1897 epistolary novel Dracula drinks his way through England, he travels there on a ship called the...
(August 10, 2023)
THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH. Whether because or in spite of its unrepentant silliness (stupidity?), I found a lot to like about The Meg (2018). Jason Statham plying his acerbic...
(August 3, 2023)
TALK TO ME. Australia, home to venomous brown snakes, saltwater crocodiles and a snail that can evidently kill you with a tiny harpoon-like tooth, is scary enough. Perhaps the...
(July 27, 2023)
OPPENHEIMER. It comes as no surprise that Christopher Nolan's latest magnum opus should be heralded for its audacity and scale. He being a holdover from another time, if such a...
(July 20, 2023)
What I couldn't have articulated then, and perhaps cannot now, was director Brian De Palma's critical role as both arbiter and synthesist of cinema cool, even as his career was...
(July 13, 2023)
JOY RIDE. It has been rather widely reported — but may still be apocryphal — that at some point during the development of this screenplay, the writers (Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and...
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Asteroid City
(July 6, 2023)
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. Time may eventually allow us to more properly contextualize the great Dr. Jones. Younger generations may have already done it, distanced as they...
(June 29, 2023)
NO HARD FEELINGS. Within the ever-deepening river of pan-cultural division, there are convoluted, often contradictory undercurrents too numerous to parse. In this new age of (dis)information, some of these knotty...
(June 22, 2023)
EXTRACTION 2. It could be said 2020 came on a little strong. Many of us met the uncertainty, paranoia and concern with a voracious consumption of media, both new and...
(June 15, 2023)
FLAMIN' HOT touts itself as a heartwarming tale of grit and pride, and a corrective to the injustices Latinos face in the U.S. (and Hollywood in particular), but it's a...
(June 8, 2023)
YOU HURT MY FEELINGS. Sometime in the future, a forensic anthropologist trying to understand human society in the year 2023 will wonder how it felt to identify as "bougie" in...
