Click here to listen to the interview with Emerald Fennell. It is fitting that SALTBURN starts with a flame. Emerald Fennell’s black comedy of a sophomore effort is, after all, a scorched earth approach to class warfare, and one that then proceeds to rub metaphorical salt in the wounds said warfare engenders. That’s it’s also… Read More »
FERRARI
FERRARI is an exceptional immersive experience. Not just for the way it virtually puts you in the driver’s seat during the racing sequences, but also, and moreso, for the way it puts you in the mind of its title character as he negotiates a major turning point in his life. Michael Mann’s opus about the… Read More »
ALL OF US STRANGERS
What is real? Is it the physical world around us that, as Lily Tomlin once put it, is really nothing more than a collective hunch, or is it the emotional world we construct for ourselves from memory, and pain, and hope? Andrew Haigh’s enigmatic meditation of a film, ALL OF US STRANGERS considers just that… Read More »
POOR THINGS
Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Emma Stone for THE HELP. POOR THINGS is a glorious gothic fantasy of the grotesque and the macabre rendered with high art and low comedy. Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has found his muse in Emma Stone, who give a performance that blends careful construction with wild abandon.… Read More »
THE IRON CLAW
Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Sean Durkin for MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE. It would be too easy to pigeonhole THE IRON CLAW as a gloss on toxic masculinity in our culture. To be sure, that element is mightily present in Sean Durkin’s poetic tale of fathers and sons. Based on the… Read More »
GODZILLA MINUS ONE
GODZILLA: MINUS ONE returns to the original, post-war iteration of the iconic kaiju. Not with the special effects that bring the mountainous monster to life, but rather with the zeitgeist of those times fueled by the sense of futility over the war just lost, and the conviction that the government had betrayed its people. As… Read More »
AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM
AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM is a tired pastiche of the super-hero/sci-fi genre most notable for being a perfect distillation of the phenomenon known as “super-hero fatigue”. Smothered by its been-there, seen-that vibe, it presents little to recommend it beyond Randall Park as both the embodiment of egregious exposition and the voice of reason. He… Read More »
AMERICAN FICTION
At one point in AMERICANN FICTION, the provocatively named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), notes that there is no moral to his story. Perhaps, though, that >is< the moral. In his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, Cord Jefferson takes on many issues for which there are no clear-cut answers, but for which the questions… Read More »
WONKA
It would have been more wrong than I can enumerate not to reference 1971’s WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY in its prequel, WONKA. Hence the purple cutaway coat, the top hat, and not just the only possible Oompa-Loompa song, but also the signature wistfulness of “Pure Imagination” by Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newly. Screenwriters… Read More »
DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN
DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN is a melancholy descant on the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It begins typically enough, with the audio recording of an eyewitness detailing what he saw right in front of him that day in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s head was shattered by bullet. The throat catches, and he has to… Read More »
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