movie reviews
Movie Review: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
4 stars out of 5 I generally only review movies that can be seen in a theater, but the Coen Brothers are maybe my all-time favorite filmmakers, and this was kind of in theaters for a few days, so… I’m reviewing it! My blog, my rules. I’ll end the suspense: I liked it a whole […]
Movie Review: Boy Erased
4 stars out of 5 I first noticed Joel Edgerton in the 2013 Leo version of The Great Gatsby, in which the Aussie struggled with an American accent. By 2015, he impressed me in Black Mass. But to be honest, I still confused him with Joel Kinnaman from The Killing. From now on, I promise […]
Movie Review: The Girl in the Spider’s Web
3 stars out of 5 As Meatloaf once said, Claire Foy: Don’t be sad, ’cause two out of three ain’t bad. Foy has had a real nice 2018, with Unsane and First Man, but her luck finally ran out. Not that The Girl in the Spider’s Web is bad — it’s certainly watchable — just […]
Movie Review: Bohemian Rhapsody
4 stars out of 5 It was late 1977. My family went to a record store, and my sister and I were each allowed to buy one album. She selected the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and I chose News of the World by Queen. I listened to it over and over and over again, poring […]
Movie Review: Halloween
3.5 stars out of 5 After the real-life horror in Pittsburgh last weekend, I thought some old-school fictional horror might do me some good. It was only a few years ago when I sat down and really watched the original 1978 Halloween as an adult. So with that and a quick Wikipedia refresher, I was […]
Movie Review: The Old Man & the Gun
3 stars out of 5 The truth is, I haven’t given much thought to Robert Redford in my lifetime. When I was tiny, The Sting was a big deal, and people were still talking about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (I guess less media = longer attention spans.) But I don’t think I actually […]
Movie Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?
3.5 stars out of 5 Reviews by their very nature are not objective, and this one is extra tricky for me, as not only was I friends with Lee Israel for some 17 years, but I also did a little consulting on an earlier iteration of this movie. So you could say that I attended […]
Movie Review: First Man
4 stars out of 5 You were expecting me to review a different movie? Patience, dear friends. I’ve been fairly interested in space exploration my entire life, yet I was surprised how little I knew about the Apollo moon mission and the lengthy lead-up to it. Weird. Was there never another movie about it? Were […]
Movie Review: Fahrenheit 11/9
4.5 stars out of 5 Everyone except your most alt-right friends regards Donald Trump as a dangerous idiot, but Michael Moore is not here to preach to the choir. In answering his central question — “How the fuck did this happen?” — he pulls no punches while indicting Bill Clinton, the New York Times, the […]
Movie Review: A Simple Favor
1 star out of 5 I do not care to be played for a fool. First, on Sunday, Moviepass told me I could go see this film at my local cinema as part of my pre-paid plan. Except, when I got to the theater on Monday afternoon, the movie had mysteriously vanished from the app. […]
Jack Silbert, curator