MAESTRO. Due as much to my penchant for low-culture goonery as anything else, Bradley Cooper’s decision to follow up his directorial debut — A Star Is Born (2018), admittedly also a thematic outlier to me — with a meditation on the life and times of Leonard Bernstein seemed anachronistic, to say the least. Shame on […]
Broadway Cinema
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What’s Under the Hood
ANYONE BUT YOU might have been titled Shakespeare for Dummies, Starring Sydney Sweeney’s Decolletage. Earlier this year, a couple of studio comedies (Joyride and No Hard Feelings) threatened to revivify the genre with new perspectives and insightful, pointed writing in service of jokes that are actually funny; it felt like a moment. This, on the […]
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Looking Back, Maybe Forward
Being that the only notable new release (at least in local theaters) this past weekend was Wonka, a moment of reflection presented itself. Not to dismiss Willy’s origin story; to the contrary, I’ve long immersed myself in the source material and the revelatory 1971 adaptation. I’ll continue to skip Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s portrait-in-rictus […]
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Strange Escapes
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND. A degree of healthy apprehension generally attends the adaptation of a very recent, very successful novel (this one published in 2020 by author Rumaan Alam). Of course, this is a formula as old as Hollywood, empowering the twinned cabals of movies and publishing to form a hydra and hopefully double their […]
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A Dream Within a Nightmare
In an era of lamentation, one that might have been defined by the extinction of boldness in American movies, we may instead have arrived at a moment of renewal. It would be specious to attribute this welcome, certainly unexpected shift to any one artist or studio or streaming service, but it is noteworthy that the […]
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Obituary‘s Black Heart
OBITUARY. There should be something like a Scoville scale for dark humor, gradations of blackness that range from, say, a No. 2 pencil to the underwing of a raven to the lightless ocean floor to the imagined void of a black hole. Like peppers, not all of these give pleasure to all. And to taste […]
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Thanksgiving is a Turkey
THANKSGIVING. The scream and spatter of slasher movies hasn’t spoken to me for most of my horror-viewing life. It’s not the violence or the blood alone that turns me off — my action movie palate is unencumbered by those. It’s that slashers so often strike me as too fascinated with female torture and/or unable to […]
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The Killer and Dicks Go Big
THE KILLER. Given what we know — or think we know — about David Fincher, it is almost too tempting to see his latest as a smirking work of self-reflective satire. This contravenes the most basic tenet of what I was taught to call New Criticism, which is, clears throat, reads aloud: never conflate the […]
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Slow Build
THE ROYAL HOTEL. I was momentarily at a loss, Killers of the Flower Moon having left a rightful vacuum, both in terms of theatrical releases (who wants to follow that?) and my desire to go see them. This was compounded by a sense of having missed out on scary movie season. And so I cast […]
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The Evil that White Men Do
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. In a recent profile for the Los Angeles Times, Marissa R. Moss refers to “the radical empathy” of Jason Isbell, the frequently mis-described artist whose albums have spent more time on the turntable in this house than any other’s in the last decade. Not coincidentally, Isbell has a small but […]
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Good Luck, Ladies
In my (lately frequent) absences, the Editor seems compelled to see and write almost exclusively about horror. I suspect the impetus for this is actually two-fold. Despite frequent, vociferous protestations, the Editor is actually an ardent fan of the genre. But these occasions allow her even more opportunity than the normal, strictly enforced, brigade-style hierarchy […]
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Character Star
REPTILE. There are character actors and there are movie stars, and in between is Benicio Del Toro. Like many, I first became fully aware of Del Toro with The Usual Suspects (1995), written by the now-anointed Christopher McQuarrie and directed by the lately canceled Hollywood monster Bryan Singer. Standing out among a cast of standouts, […]