Happy Gilmore 2 at In Review Online

My first contemporaneous review for In Review Online!

Inherent Vice (2014) over at In Review Online and a Quick Update

As you can no doubt tell, I've been writing in this space less frequently as of late because I'm publishing at In Review Online. I intend to update it regularly with pointers to work not hosted here, and I will also continue to publish more personal

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

I wrote about this extraordinary movie for In Review Online to commemorate its 20th anniversary.

A World-Class Achievement

On A Minecraft Movie and a Future of Media Team, It’s a hit! This opening weekend, movie-going audiences dug into A Minecraft Movie, making it the no. 1 film in the U.S. and 75 global markets, bringing in an impressive $313.7 million – the largest domestic opening weekend

The Neural Network with Red Hair

"What's that say? Oh, um . . . it's Latin for From Small Things We Aspire Toward the Great." -- The Woman with Red Hair I listen, with alarming regularity and alacrity, to the podcast The Town. It's delicious junk food, and, as someone who&

At Night, All Cows are Black

Growing up, December and January held the distinction of best and worst months in moviegoing, respectively. For a few reasons, these distinctions have melted away. The first of which is simply the disintegration of something called the movie calendar altogether. Traditionally, at least from my layperson's POV, the

The Brutalist (2024, Corbet)

(Spoilers) Overture Let’s, for a moment, set aside the hysterics, the histrionics, and the hyperbole. Let’s imagine that The Brutalist hasn’t been met with a response equal in rapture to Dark Side of the Moon playing backwards in your veins, with claims not unlike Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s

The Night Of (2016, Created by Richard Price & Steven Zallian)

I like the serial format, generally; I like what can be done with it to build suspense, to enhance mystery, and to deepen the psychological interiority of a particular work's characters. Crime & Punishment was published serially, for example. The format seems to behoove crime stories, but even

The Substance (2024, Fargeat)

A who’s who of extreme cinema lions hiding in the shadows here: Noe, Cronenberg, Lynch, Easton Ellis/Harron, Von Trier, Argento, and I’m sure I’m neglecting a few more. This shouldn’t work; it’s never worked for me before: arthouse horror sucks. But Fargeat snuck a

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024, Phillips)

Frownland Spoilers Fully expected to hate this; turns out it was made specifically for people who hated the first one. Sat bemused and slightly irritated for the first forty minutes, feelings growing ever exacerbated by the minute following each howl from the Joker Head behind me, but when it reveals

Megalopolis (2024, Coppola)

Time Stop A little autobiography: My dad introduced me to Francis Ford Coppola through Apocalypse Now. First by way of his incessant quoting of the movie, particularly the immortal “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line, and then via the DVD (theatrical, not redux) we had found

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024, Levy)

NOTE: This is meant to be read in conjunction with my Twisters review. "I'm definitely gonna be the People's champion, but . . . I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be." - Muhammad Ali Ring the bell, Deadpool is the People'

Twisters (2024, Chung)

Note: Major spoiler in paragraph three. It’s easy to tell that Lee Isaac Chung—director of the modest, exceptional Arkansas drama Minari—wants to make a earnest paean to middle America and its folk culture while integrating the inexorable blemish of capital and technology on that culture, both popularizing

Amadeus (1984, Forman)

My story with Amadeus began, as I'm sure it often does, with my grandfather. My grandpa always liked movies, but demonstrated a particular inclination following my grandma's death: he would invite me over to watch classics like The Godfather and Gladiator or catch new releases that

MaXXXine (2024, West)

There's one major spoiler here in the final paragraph. This one's for the cinephiles. The lovers of film. The celluloid obsessed. And MaXXXine couldn't be worse for it. A smug, satisfied, self-proclaimed "B-movie with A-ideas", MAXXXine is the nadir of Ti West&

The Bikeriders (2024, Nichols)

Decent. Airless, but decent. Fails to recapture the regional magic of Jeff Nichols's great 2011-2012 masterpieces Take Shelter and Mud, films that sing with urgency and specificity and quite a bit to say about the narratives white Americans follow to gain a sense of footing in a fast-changing

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, Miller)

Well, awesome, first of all. Total fucking gongshow creativity and ingenuity here, it's such a thrill to be back in the hands of the maestro after nearly a decade. My relationship to movies--and my orientation toward the world into which movies are birthed--has changed a lot in those

The Ten Best Movies of 2023

Foreword: My list has been set for months, but I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker with it obsessively until I realized, shit, we are just about to enter the sixth calendar month of the next year. Anyway, here it is. Fashionably late is better than never. There will

I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Schoenbrun)

Good, but frustratingly close to being really good and occasionally great which makes the fact that it is merely good all the more disappointing. Schoenbrun has a vision, and commands exceptional control of color in their frames. They have big ideas, and a clear affection for the forgotten (and lost,

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024, Ball)

Spoilers below I'll never forget the feeling of total overwhelming awe that crashed into me upon the conclusion of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the feeling I chase with just about every movie I ever watch and rarely experience. It wasn't just me, either:

Challengers (2024, Guadagnino)

TASHI: What am I?  PATRICK: In reality? A really, really, insanely hot woman. - Challengers “Did you ever think there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good looking?”  - Zoolander No Bones & All, with its tearful elegy for a Midwest sunken in sand—Guadagnino’s

Civil War (2024, Garland)

Major spoiler at the end of this, FWIW. Moronic, phony Call of Duty knockoff suffused with neoliberal guilt. Insofar as it is successful at anything, it is as a corny allegory for the insufficiency of media to capture the zeitgeist or to animate positive action. Which, okay, are we making

Past Lives (2023, Song)

Past Lives is last year's anointed Sundance Darling, and it's a category to which I am not entirely allergic. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, and Minari are all films I love. But for every victory there's a maudlin and sycophantic movie that inexplicably

The Beekeeper (2024, Ayer)

David Ayer initially caught my attention at the age of 12 upon a screening of Street Kings with my grandpa. I was really into violence at the time, but Ayer mostly dropped off the map for me until Suicide Squad, which continues to hold the distinction of worst hatchet job