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 and 2011; The Man from UNCLE, 2015; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, 2017; Aladdin, 2019) — apparently still feels compelled to return to the […]
Fortuna Theatre
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Virgin River’s Washed-out Humboldt
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 an upheaval stemming from one member’s critique of another member’s blithely racist novel. Down the RWA rabbit hole I learned the genre has undergone some major […]
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The Virtues of Just Mercy
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, belongs in the Important column, it arrives without self-generated fanfare or grandstanding. It builds a case for its own significance with quietly confident style, heartfelt […]
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The Grudge isn’t Worth Holding Onto
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 atypically gorgeous January day. There had been rain overnight but it had given way to the sort of limitless cerulean horizon people rush out to […]
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Diamonds in the Rough
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 city is all teeth, knives and broken glass, scrutiny and anonymity at once — paranoia as landscape. And the brothers Safdie, Benny and Josh, have recently […]
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End of Empire
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 text and called me both a “gronch” and a grinch — which is earned and fair, if not entirely accurate. This was in response, after […]
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No Good Deed
Reviews 6UNDERGROUND. More than six years ago, I reviewed Pain & Gain (2013) and, in so doing, established that I will not, whether out of actual enjoyment or simple contrarianism, participate in the popular wholesale condemnation of Michael Bay movies. I find much of his work arch and unenjoyable, but there are simple pleasures in […]
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Long Goodbyes
Reviews THE IRISHMAN. This is not exactly a new release. But as art and entertainment now live deathlessly — like identity, real or manufactured, and all of our malfeasance and misadventure — in the digital ether, I’m not too worried about it. Nor do I find it bothersome that the movie’s Netflix release might somehow […]
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Knives Out is Razor Sharp
Reviews KNIVES OUT. Classic mystery fans are an odd lot. We gleefully watch fancy people in drafty estates stab, shoot, garotte, bash, poison and shove one another down ornate staircases. It’s a genre that rewards conformity and low stakes: the parsing of clues, red herrings and the big reveal. Do I even want to see […]
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Life Underground
Reviews PARASITE. We are truly living in a golden age of scammers. Behold the sea of catfishing schemes, the jet-setting Anna Sorokin enjoyed on the tabs of rich Manhattanites by posing as a German heiress and the puffed-up conman we’ve installed in the White House, from whence he uses his position to fill his coffers […]
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Buckle Up
Reviews FORD VS. FERRARI. Motorsport in the middle 1960s stood on the precipice of change: still hewing to its daredevil origins, it remained delicate and brutal, homebuilt and homicidal. It was a time when a little upstart car company off the beach of Los Angeles, helmed by a former world-class racing driver turned failed chicken […]
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Doctor Sleep’s Diminishing Returns
Reviews DOCTOR SLEEP. Stephen King famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s version of his novel The Shining (book 1977, movie 1980). It’s not my place to say he’s wrong but … he is. While Kubrick’s is a liberal adaptation, therein lies the whole damn point. Books are not movies, nor the reverse, and this business of simply […]