ALIEN COVENANT is a mixed bag. As a horror movie, it is unimpeachable, adding an extra self-refractive layer of pleasure to an audience that knows exactly what is lurking there in the giant deserted spaceship that our intrepid space colonists discover. As a vehicle for advancing the meta-story of the Alien franchise, it is far… Read More »
SPECTRE
There are very specific things we want in a James Bond film. Great action, dastardly villains who are larger than life and twice as buggy, and Bond girls who have evolved over the years to be a bit more than merely a pulchritudinous interlude. In Bond, as incarnated by Daniel Craig, we want a steely… Read More »
RANGO
RANGO triumphantly trades on the peculiar appeal of the well-executed excursion into the grotesque. Channeling spaghetti westerns, Cervantes, Castaneda, and a dash of CHINATOWN as refracted through the visual sensibilities of Dali, it is a fiendishly clever concretion of high- and low-brow in a story that is both vision quest and farce. The eponymous and… Read More »
SKYFALL
SKYFALL may not be the best Bond film ever, but there has certainly never been a better entry in the series. The trademark mordant wit, breakneck action, and visceral eroticism are all in evidence here, and operating at their finest level, but there is a subtle yet piquant, tweaking of the usual formula that makes… Read More »
THE AVIATOR
Crash and burn is a painfully apt metaphor for the life of Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) as told in Martin Scorseses THE AVIATOR. We even see two such events in the course of its almost three hours of running time. Unlike the tidier myth of Icarus, though, Hughes story is more than just genius meeting… Read More »