10s movies
Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road
4 stars out of 5 I have very vague recollections of the original batch of Mad Max films. The Road Warrior, I’m pretty sure I saw on home video. And then I think we rented Mad Max after the fact? Yet all I remember is dust and cars and angry Australians. I definitely didn’t see […]
Movie Review: Ex Machina
4 stars out of 5 Sci-fi, you see, while seemingly about the FUTURE, is really about NOW, ya dig? Godzilla was about nuclear annihilation and Planet of the Apes was about civil rights and Ex Machina is about… uh… Google. We like looking stuff up but then we’re, like, afraid of these companies having all […]
Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron
3 stars out of 5 Eh, go see it if you want to. Stuff blows up, people fly around. I expected a little more but, dashed hopes and I are dear old friends. The thing is, I thought that first Avengers movie was pretty great. Instead of the doom-and-gloom, muted palate of so many recent […]
Movie Review: Black Souls
4 stars out of 5 OK, let’s take out our mafia-movie checklist: Italians, multi-generation family, rival family, guns, drugs, glasses-wearing brother who’s “good at business,” brother who doesn’t want to be involved, hot-headed young guy, black Members Only-style jackets over black shirts, small clumps of furtive men standing around in aforementioned jackets. Black Souls, released […]
Movie Review: My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records
4 stars out of 5 Last week I reviewed the Wrecking Crew documentary. In it, they discuss the Hal Blaine drumbeat opening to “Be My Baby,” instantly recognizable to millions of people the world over. The same cannot be said for the Dr. Rhythm drum machine which accompanies “Emma’s House” by the Field Mice, as […]
Movie Review: The Wrecking Crew!
4 stars out of 5 I saw this documentary on my birthday, but I slacked off for more than two weeks before reviewing it. Still, that’s totally in the spirit of the film: It was 18 years in the works, and even on IMDB it’s listed as a 2008 movie. But with the help of […]
Movie Review: The Imitation Game
3.5 stars out of 5 Alan Turing had entered my life twice before. In a required philosophy lecture course in my freshman year of college, we used a piece of software called “Turing’s World.” (Yep, it was such a geeky school, there were even computers in philosophy class.) Then, more than a decade later, my […]
Movie Review: Whiplash
3 stars out of 5 This is a movie that thinks it is much better than it is. And I have to imagine that everybody heaping praise and awards on J.K. Simmons just never saw him as Vern Schillinger (hard G, thank you!) on OZ. Not that he doesn’t give a great performance in Whiplash, […]
Movie Review: American Sniper
2.5 stars out of 5 I thought the commercial for American Sniper was really, really good. The actual movie, on the other hand…. A little backstory on me deciding to see American Sniper last night. As you may know, I like going to the movies on Tuesdays, which used to be free for me, and […]
My Highly Subjective List of the Best Movies of 2014
Here’s how this works: I go to the movies. While I’m watching, I think, “I like this quite a lot” or perhaps “I don’t like this very much at all.” Then, at the end of the year (or, if you want to be technical, the beginning of the next), I think back on all the […]
Jack Silbert, curator