movie reviews
Movie Review: Nightmare Alley
4.5 stars out of 5During pandemic days, or shall I say nights, I’ve really upped my watching of Eddie Muller’s Noir Alley offerings on TCM. One film I haven’t caught — or didn’t even known about till today — is 1947’s Nightmare Alley. Which is probably for the best, as I strolled into 2021’s Nightmare […]
Movie Review: Drive My Car
4.5 stars out of 5When my Golden Books picture book The Christmas Aliens was published in 1998, my friend Dave wrote a joke review on Amazon proclaiming it the “best book since Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase.” I’d never heard of Haruki Murakami but soon picked up that novel and was entranced. Two-plus decades later, […]
Movie Review: Licorice Pizza
4 stars out of 5In the ongoing battle of the Andersons, Wes served first this year with The French Dispatch, but Paul Thomas has returned serve strongly with Licorice Pizza. Interestingly, both films are actually more collections of scenes rather than cohesive plot-driven narratives. And where Wes’s was studied and precise, P.T. throws it all […]
Movie Review: Red Rocket
3.5 stars out of 5Red Rocket is the new film from Sean Baker, writer/director of The Florida Project. I really liked the vibe and strong sense of place in that movie, and the great performance from Willem Dafoe. (What I didn’t like: There were so many SCREAMING KIDS in the story.) With this follow-up, Baker […]
Movie Review: Spider-Man — No Way Home
3.5 stars out of 5I thought we could get some peace and quiet while the Avengers are still off in disintegrated-into-ash land. But nope, the new Spidey flick starts yanking favorite old baddies from the Multiverse (registered trademark Zuckerberg Industries), and I bet the hack screenwriters were kicking themselves for already using Homecoming as a […]
Movie Review: Belfast
3.5 stars out of 5Yes, I attend Joe Hurley’s All-Star Irish Rock Revue every year, hoping Don Fleming will sing “The Bogside Man,” and in the early 90s I was in the Tir na nÓg pub in Trenton at midnight one night when they had a moment of silence for Bobby Sands. But the truth […]
Movie Review: West Side Story
5 stars out of 5The closest I ever came to seeing West Side Story before was the Michael Jackson “Bad” video, and Chris Elliott as Marv Albert singing “Somewhere” on Letterman. (“There’s a place for us — YES!!”) But Spielberg is my boy, so I figured I’d give the new version a shot. And all […]
Movie Review: Ghostbusters — Afterlife
4 stars out of 5Ghostbusters is my jam. It was perfection when I was 15: an ideal blend of smart, silly, juvenile, and flat-out funny. I’ll always remember being at my buddy John’s house for New Year’s Eve; at midnight we discovered that HBO was playing Ghostbusters, and even though we’d both seen it in […]
Movie Review: The French Dispatch
4.5 stars out of 5Or maybe 4 out of 5, but, somewhere in there. As I’ve said a number of times, there are a handful of directors that I am absolutely crazy about, and Wes Anderson is one of them. Perhaps I’m too soft on them or perhaps I hold them to too high a […]
Movie Review: Dune
3.5 stars out of 5Never read Dune, never watched Dune. In middle school it seemed like a lot of dudes were reading it. Not. And even though I loved Sting and later, David Lynch, no interest in the movie. Decades went by, and finally I decided to check out the reboot — in a theater […]
Jack Silbert, curator