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 U.S., that gets me on the list. I am not egotistical enough to imagine I’ll go to the camp with the first or second tier […]
Broadway Cinema
Posted inArts + Scene
Ghost in the Screenplay
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 Clinton years and the “independent” cinema boom of the ’90s cohering to provide a financially and intellectual libertine environment wherein a screenwriter, of all things, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
An Excellent Balm for Bogus Times
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 or The New Mutants. Those two, from a distance, appear to basically be throwaways, the latter a seemingly unloved stepchild within the extended Marvel family, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Shadow of Death
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 to it. The movie nerd internet — with which I barely and reluctantly engage, I’ll have you know — has been clamoring for some time […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Superhero Surprise
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 question, as Foxx’s contribution to Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006), a seminal if divisive document of the early ’00s and one of my favorite movies […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Underworld Underachiever
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 war, to mixed degrees of success. Occasionally he’ll explore a universally acknowledged conflict, a War with a capital W: U-571 (2000) and Fury (2014), which […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Girls on Their Own
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 in the high school talent show is nobody’s best day. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) may not know she’s pregnant when we meet her but she’s having […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dirty Jobs
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 of Froot Loops when her menacing, unseen boss arrives, curtailing her would-be breakfast. Later, when she brings lunch for herself and her male deskmates (because […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Trouble Man
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 half in jest but my inability to answer immediately still troubles me. Even as protests for racial justice and against sanctioned murder by police continue […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Resourceful People
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 make a sandwich or pick up his dry cleaning.” The intervening years (or decades or centuries) have softened both my rhetoric and my feelings about […]
Posted inArts + Scene
An Eye on the Competition
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 reminder that having feelings doesn’t necessarily mean always feeling bad and a chance to briefly dispel the cloud of fatalism that can so frequently block […]
Posted inNews
Local Movie Theaters Approved to Reopen, But Not All Will
You could get away from the heat and incessant boom of amateur fireworks this weekend and sit in the air-conditioned cool of Broadway Cinema, escaping from the endless cycle of bad news for the big screen spectacle about a looming, mostly-unseen threat that picks off the unwary and reckless. Jaws will be playing, along with […]