10s movies
Movie Review: The Big Short
3.5 stars out of 5 January is a weird time at the movies. The studios tend to dump garbage that they didn’t release the previous year. Other selections are “prestige films” left over from the holidays, or snuck in at the end of December for Oscar consideration. From that second batch, at my local theater […]
On gratuitous fucks
Films these days are cluttered with gratuitous fucks. I’m talking about good films, thoughtful films, ones with Oscar buzz. I understand there are commercial reasons for wanting your film to have an R rating, and if your film is a grown-up comedy of manners or tale of corporate intrigue mostly devoid of sex and violence, […]
Movie Review: Anomalisa
3.5 stars out of 5 Remember Being John Malkovich? Wow, that was fun, right? And ingenious. Then there was Adaptation, also very clever. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that was pretty wild if I recall. Synecdoche, New York: I didn’t see it, did you? I read a review and it just sounded too… […]
My Highly Subjective List of the Best Movies of 2015
Eh, keep yer IMAX 3D Ultra Panavision 70 Dine-While-You-Watch Reserved Seating hoo-ha; I don’t need gimmicks to get excited about the movies. (Plus, I feel like a real jagoff if I spend $23 for a ticket and it’s still crummy.) Here are the films from last year that I thought were the best. Of the […]
Movie Review: The Hateful Eight (Special Roadshow Engagement)
3.5 stars out of 5 If you’re going to shoot in Ultra Panavision 70 — the first movie in nearly 50 years to do so — maybe, just maybe, don’t set the great majority of the 3 hour, 7 minute film in ONE ROOM? But hey, I’m not the filmmaker here. Quentin Tarantino is. And […]
Movie Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
4 stars out of 5 I was 8 years old when the original Star Wars came out and like everybody else I knew, I was all in. Poster on my bedroom wall, action figures, comic books. I loved trying to draw R2-D2. My dad took me into San Francisco one day to meet Darth Vader, […]
Movie Review: Carol
3.5 stars out of 5 You ever read about something being the “best movie of the year” so you go and see it, and then you think, ‘well that was good but by no means the best movie of the year’? That’s me and Carol. I must admit to not being that up on the […]
Movie Review: Creed
3.5 stars out of 5 So, there’s this new installment in a long-running movie series, started in the ’70s, good vs. evil, iconic music. But people are especially psyched for this one because it consciously connects back to the “classic era.” Of course, I am referring to Creed, the latest chapter in the Rocky saga. […]
Movie Review: Brooklyn
4 stars out of 5 Sometimes, in these United States, a swarthy boy will fall in love with a clean Irish girl. And every once in a while, she’ll love him back. Now, in terms of Irish women, the filmmakers here were really stacking the deck by casting Saoirse Ronan as the lead. A year […]
Movie Review: Spotlight
4 stars out of 5 You’ve got a fairly talkie movie here on a topic that is, for most of us, a given — that a lot of priests have taken advantage of little boys. Early on, I was even wondering if the subject might be better served by a documentary. But the cast and […]
Jack Silbert, curator