Reviews BABY DRIVER. Writer/director Edgar Wright — like Tarantino before him and Scorsese before him — has managed to make a successful career of being a tremendous movie nerd. Unashamed of his influences and unafraid to reveal them (Hot Fuzz, 2007 being a particularly pointed example), Wright synthesizes those myriad influences into colorful, comic creations […]
Fortuna Theatre
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Boom
Reviews What makes a movie “American”? Is it patriotic or critical? Is it about identity, individualism, team spirit or oppression? Is it set in the Wild West or a modern metropolis? Does it even have to be made by an American? This is a big question and maybe even more subjective than whether a movie […]
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Girl Trouble
Reviews 47 METERS DOWN. I may have let out an audible groan when the title screen appeared: Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down. If you’ve heard of Johannes Roberts, then you probably have a subscription to Fangoria, and I’m the asshole. While the director has more than a dozen credits to his name, there wasn’t a […]
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House of Horrors
Reviews IT COMES AT NIGHT. As the recent tidal wave of smaller, independent horror movies seems to have receded a bit, we have the opportunity to consider their merits and shortcomings. As I’ve remarked (probably too many times) before, there were within that group a few very pleasant surprises. As with anything of value, though, […]
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Who Run the World?
Reviews WONDER WOMAN. As much as we shouldn’t have to be talking about gender or gender inequality anymore, recent events support the notion that we do. Plodding progress continues to be made but the threat of a systemic course reversal looms. As we plunge blindly into the middle of the 21st century, humanity ought to […]
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Swim at Your Own Risk
Reviews BAYWATCH. Who, really, is to blame when something terrible like this happens? And I say “to blame” rather than “responsible” because there are a great number of responsible parties, from grips to craft services, who share in the responsibility of bringing a movie to the screen. And despite their pivotal role in the collaborative […]
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I’m With Her
Reviews ALIEN: COVENANT. I saw Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking Alien (1979) too young and imprinted on its visceral sci-fi horror like a duckling. Artist H.R. Giger, whose work calls to mind an Art Nouveau death cult, designed a beast that finally frightened us more than humans. Its oil-slick, black, eyeless bullet of a head, with its […]
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Throwaway Throwbacks
Reviews SNATCHED. When Amy Schumer, building on the success both of her stand-up comedy and subversive, hilarious TV show Inside Amy Schumer, made her first foray into the Hollywood mainstream, she did it like a cagey pro. Teaming with director Judd Apatow, starring and working from her own screenplay, she came out with Trainwreck (2015). […]
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Family Messes
Reviews THE DINNER. Elliptical awkwardness isn’t everybody’s thing and that’s understandable. In real life, it’s almost nobody’s thing, and those who enjoy it are challenging to be around, to say the least. But cinematically, a sort of rootless discomfiture can go a long way toward establishing tone, serving story and locating characters in context. Such […]
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Big Girls, Big Brothers
THE CIRCLE. Where have all the techno-thrillers gone? I began to wonder this after my disappointing afternoon with The Circle. I claim to be no expert in the subgenre, but the ’80s and ’90s were rife with paranoid thought experiments about the cyberworld we were creating. Did we peak at The Matrix? Perhaps 9/11 brought […]
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Running for Cover
Reviews THE PROMISE. And so we revisit the conundrum of the historical drama, tangled with as recently as last week regarding The Zookeeper’s Wife. Again, a movie takes as its setting a horrific 20th century catastrophe — this time the outbreak of World War I and the Armenian genocide — and attempts to capture a […]
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Escape/Escapism
REVIEWS THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE. Period drama can, and in this case does, provide a respite from the breakneck editing and handheld camerawork that have subsumed the modern cinematic lexicon. It can give its creators an opportunity to focus on details of set design and costuming and language that, in a contemporary setting, might not merit […]