Reviews GRINGO. On the face of it, Gringo would seem to offer just enough of a number of titillating things to ensure a fine time at the movies: corporate intrigue, criminal hijinks down ol’ Mexico way, pharmaceutical cannabis, a mercenary on the prowl. What’s not to like? And, fair enough, all those things do indeed […]
Fortuna Theatre
Posted inArts + Scene
Cold War Warmed Over
REVIEWS RED SPARROW. There is something — a great number of things, probably — to be said in art and cinema and literature about the renewing of hostilities between the United States and Russia, the questionable end of the Cold War these three decades on and the macho-posturing, democracy reducing, oligarch good-old-boys clubs running the […]
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Strange Expectations
Reviews GAME NIGHT. We live in a time of lowered expectations, especially when it comes to the movies. And yet, somehow I often find just enough optimism, somewhere, within this long thought dry well, to fall for the marketing or the pedigree or the fleeting hopeful mood of an afternoon and give a movie the […]
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Black Panther Goes Big
Reviews BLACK PANTHER. It seems important, maybe necessary, to set a few things straight: I hope Black Panther breaks all of the records, that it somehow financially bankrupts the already creatively and ethically destitute elements of the movie industry, that it creates broad, sweeping change in media, in attitudes and in our national conversation. The […]
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Fifty Shades Freed is for Masochists
Reviews FIFTY SHADES FREED. It’s been a very long seven years since E.L. James morphed fan-fiction erotica into a three-book, three-movie deal. Since then, the edginess has dulled and the Steele dossier has stolen the thunder of any scandalous stories of kink from the love life of Anastasia Steele. It’s not only real life that […]
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Love Makes Fools of Us All
Reviews I, TONYA. In aging and being slowly, reluctantly drawn into what someone decided to call adulthood, I have developed what I consider a cagey defense that some might consider paranoia regarding those most dangerous among us: the Dumbass and the Devious. Dumbass, devious people, in my experience, possess what I would call a gift […]
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Lost in the Darkness
Reviews HOSTILES. I’ve been perhaps misguidedly attempting to sort out my feelings about writer/director Scott Cooper’s work — generally but also in this column — since Crazyheart (2009), his feature debut. That movie got all kinds of press, most of it for Jeff Bridges’ lead performance and most of that well deserved. Even then I […]
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Monsters and Phantoms
Reviews THE SHAPE OF WATER. Guillermo del Toro loves a monster movie. He’s been working on variations within the genre for 25 years or so and he seems to be one of its last, great practitioners. As modern and self-aware as he may be, his work still belies a reverence for the classics of early […]
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Post Up
Reviews THE POST. My brother, an attorney quicker both in wit and temper than I, said to me some months ago, “When they go after the free press, we must take up arms.” Based on that, you might call him something of a firebrand, a reactionary. You wouldn’t be wrong. But he is also a […]
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About a Boy
Review THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER. On the heels of my uncharacteristically optimistic (surprised myself with that one!) survey of the cinema of 2017 last week (“The Best of 2017,” Jan. 4), I can’t quite decide if I’m glad I hadn’t seen this yet. On one hand, it is certainly one of the most […]
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The Best of 2017
Years ago now, some friends of mine were at a shooting range taking some target practice. They were alone in the place, except for a pair of women, one of whom was hurriedly re-familiarizing herself with the operation of her pistol because, as she had very openly explained to my friends, her estranged husband was […]
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Honey, I Shrunk Downsizing and Jumanji Can’t Fill the Screen
DOWNSIZING. A sprawling sci-fi satire, ironically, Downsizing can’t seem to shrink its ambition into a manageable story. Alexander Payne’s (Election, Sideways) take on American ambition, class inequity, climate change, consumerism, predatory dream capitalism and the end of the world might’ve fit if its ostensible hero Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) wasn’t such a milquetoast. His struggle […]