THE WHALE. It is an easy, reductive, even dismissive temptation to qualify Darren Aronofsky’s work as “difficult” or “challenging.” Ambitious? Polarizing? Indubitably. But in referring to it as challenging, or academic, people generally seem to mean they don’t like it, or that it makes them think about things they’d rather not. (The irony of my […]
Broadway Cinema
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Babylon Towers
BABYLON. As soon as we saw the trailer, my wife, who plays her cinephilia close to the vest most of the time, said, “I want to see that! It looks like a Coen brothers movie, doesn’t it?” When the time came to commit, though, she was less enthusiastic, (like most of the intended audience). This […]
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The Cutting Room Floor
THE FABELMANS. The elevator pitch would have us believe this is a movie about the magic of (watching and making) movies, a life dedicated to a calling and the simple conflict in a house divided by art versus pragmatism. It can be so defined, of course; Steven Spielberg does not generally go in for unkind […]
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Glass Onion‘s Layered Craftsmanship
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. What makes a movie a Christmas movie? I recently listened to a podcast in which a host floated the idea that the best holiday movies are ones that encourage reflection on the past year and prepare us for the year ahead. They were inspired by watching It’s a Wonderful […]
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Exit Strategies
DECISION TO LEAVE. Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003) lives on the not-so-short list of movies a listicle might reference as impossible to watch a second time. It is, as a relatively unflappable friend intoned years ago, devastating. But, like all of Park’s work, it also bears the marks of a master: While sometimes hideously violent and […]
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Badass Santa
VIOLENT NIGHT. I set out, it my usual, aimless, addle-pated way, to construct a themed column welcoming anew the season of Christmas and, of course, Christmas movies. We have before us Spirited, the Christmas Carol musical comedy directed by Sean Anders (one of the handful of credited writers and directors allowed to make mainstream comedies) […]
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Young and Hungry
ARMAGEDDON TIME. James Gray does not live in the popular consciousness the way many of our cinematic luminaries — themselves refugees from an ongoing extinction-level event — do. This is likely as much due to geographical bias within the industry as to Gray’s refusal to cater to the whims of that industry, transitory culture or, […]
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Food, Music and Corruption
There is a theme at work here, whether by pure happenstance or more ominous cosmic coincidence, that seems unlikely at first blush. But, in this disparate collection — a quasi-verité examination of investigative journalism, a darkly comic satire of celebrity cookery and an impossibly precise character piece rendered as waking-life ghost story — there lurk […]
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Carries On
BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER. In this widely anticipated sequel, director Ryan Coogler faces the impossible task of honoring the legacy of recently deceased global hero Chadwick Boseman, while directing not only a cast of grieving actors, but also meeting expectations of Marvel movie fans. In this context, the movie becomes an enigmatic embodiment of grief […]
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Making it Weird
WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY. For many of us, there has always been Weird Al. Before we could formulate anything like a valid critical opinion, much less decide what, by our flaccid cultural barometer, could be called “good,” we could still appreciate (or at least enjoy) the overlaying of silly lyrics upon songs we could […]
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Mixed (Genre) Bag
I can’t pretend there is any cohesive theme — any connectivity, really — to the movies I will set out to briefly discuss here, except that they have all been backburnered in an uncharacteristic pursuit of the horror genre in the past month. Being a contrarian reactionary, I may willfully not watch horror movies when […]
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V/H/S/99 Hits Rewind
V/H/S/99. The year 1999 was a noisy, notable one for movies — it can be marked as the year the movie industry and probably the expectations of audiences at large changed forever, maybe not for the better. After an excruciatingly protracted, admittedly revolutionary advertising campaign, in July of that year, we were finally granted access […]