Reviews THE WAY BACK. A friend asked, after initially mistaking it for The Way Way Back (2013), if this is “that remake of Hoosiers.” It’s neither but fair enough for asking. The title doesn’t give us much to go on and the story of a hard-luck high school basketball coach bringing together a group of […]
The Miniplex
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Modern Monsters
Reviews THE INVISIBLE MAN. When news filtered down that Universal Pictures had big plans to reach back into its rich history and recast itself as the home of the monsters, complete with an MCU-paralleling Dark Universe franchise, I got a little excited. I grew up checking out the Crestwood House monster books from the elementary […]
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The Power to Disappoint
Reviews The inverse of the formidable power of movies to surprise, vex, confound, titillate and excite us lies in their capacity to disappoint. We know enough about the tricks, the history, genre and all the rest to have arrived at expectations. We have seen what can be done on the big screen and know what […]
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Love and Disaster
Reviews THE PHOTOGRAPH. The story is based on love and romance, as its Feb. 14 release date might suggest, but The Photograph, written and directed by Stella Meghie, takes a typical love story and helps it grow into so many more meaningful ideas about love and relationships than just romance or lust. The film illustrates […]
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Squad Goals
Reviews HARLEY QUINN: BIRDS OF PREY. Gratitude is … a good thing, right? Of course it is. And we should probably count ourselves grateful. Because even as the facade of American democracy continues to crumble, as we trudge ever closer toward totalitarianism, destitution and disarray, as winter drags on and tyrants grow more empowered and […]
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Babes inthe Wood
Reviews GRETEL AND HANSEL. There is much to be mined in Western fairy tales but few are as adaptable to horror as Hansel and Gretel as set down by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, with the shunned children falling prey to a cannibalistic witch. In the end, Hansel’s cleverness only goes so far and it’s […]
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Tough Guy Act
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 […]
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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 […]