With BLINK TWICE we traverse the sticky territories of toxic masculinity, cultural power structures, and the apology industry that has grown out those first two phenomena. While it’s script by E.T. Feigenbaum and director Zoë Kravitz sometimes hangs together with spit and baling wire, there is no denying the gut punch it delivers with suspense… Read More »
FLY ME TO THE MOON
It is well worth overlooking the historical inaccuracies to be found in FLY ME TO THE MOON. I’m not talking about the conspiracy theories about how the first moon landing was faked on a soundstage. This bright and breezy look at what may or may not have really happened has dedicated itself to the emotional,… Read More »
THE LOST CITY
Let us praise the genius of Sandra Bullock’s gift for physical comedy. It makes even the small business of teetering on a stool in a fuchsia-sequined jumpsuit an epic of determination, embarrassment, grit, and uncertainty. It is in no small part that THE LOST CITY, on which she was also an executive producer, is such… Read More »
LOGAN LUCKY
Transposing the milieu from glitz to grits, Steven Soderbergh’s LOGAN LUCKY does more set an intricate heist flick in the backroads of Appalachia, it also makes a sly statement about class, culture, and our preconceived notions about those two things. It also has something that most Soderbergh films lack for all their visual impact: heart.… Read More »
HAIL, CAESAR!
If Douglas Sirk had directed a film noir written by Billy Wilder, it might have looked something like HAIL, CAESAR!, the latest thoughtful tangle of philosophy and whimsy from the Coen Brothers. Taking place in a 1951 Hollywood not entirely unlike the one that actually existed, it mixes Cold War paranoia, carefully managed studio PR… Read More »
THE HATEFUL EIGHT
THE HATEFUL EIGHT is an impudent, pugnacious comedy that uses the synthetic nature of its stylized homage idiom to be a whip-smart consideration of race, gender, politics, situational ethics, and very, very bad teeth. The genre is the western, but the tone is thoroughly modern as a group of the damned journey through the desolate… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE XXL: Flash and Dazzle
Steven Soderbergh is an executive producer of MAGIC MIKE XXL, but that is the only trace of that director to be found in this sequel that is more about joy than angst. Channing Tatum, returning as the eponymous male stripper, has taken the fun and dazzle from the original and eschewed most of the cerebral… Read More »
JUPITER ASCENDING. Not.
The Wachowskis know how to produce a spectacle. In that, they may very well be the cinematic heirs of Cecil B. DeMille, whose films featured showmanship of the highest caliber, but some of whose films could charitably be described as insubstantial. And such is the case with the space saga, JUPITER ASCENDING, a film chock-a-block… Read More »
GI JOE
Breaking up is hard to do, and sometimes the fate of the whole world hangs in the balance of how it plays out. Thats the theme driving G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, an action film that is not quite as plastic as its namesake and certainly has higher production values. Its cheerfully cheesy with… Read More »
DEAR JOHN
DEAR JOHN continues the translation from page to screen of wholesome romances devised by genre juggernaut Nicholas Sparks. This one weaves 9/11 into a story about the distances between people and the difficulties in bridging them, whether those distances are spatial or emotional. Our lovely couple are Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) and John (Channing Tatum), two… Read More »