★★★ It’s a good thing this series is over so I don’t have to keep losing brain cells trying to figure out the title. Last I checked, this film’s predecessor was called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Now we have the eighth film, simply titled Final Reckoning, but which has, not to spoil […]
Birth of a Nation (1915) is no more racist than you are. 110 years after its debut onto the American screen, it seems that everyone apparently knows everything about this film from the title alone, whether they have seen it or not. Dare to mention the name of it, or the name D.W. Griffith, and […]
The following essay constitutes the second part of Godfrey Cheshire’s two-part masterpiece column “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.” Just as with Part I, which you can find here, I own none of the words, but am merely re-printing them faithfully in honor of the quarter century since its original publication. These essays were […]
The following essay is not my own. It is merely a faithful transcription of a landmark pair of essays by Godfrey Cheshire, formerly of the New York Press. It was a two-part column, now collectively known as “The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema.” I own none of the words written here, but I am […]
★★★ “Flawed as it is…” No sermons, no lectures, and no statements; but in Juror #2, Clint Eastwood empathizes with the American system of justice. Every time I saw something that otherwise would have annoyed me as a lawyer, I liked the film more for the personal ethics it applies to the political system. When […]
★★ Leaving the theater after viewing Reagan, I felt the opposite of how I imagine almost everyone else who liked the film probably felt. Instead of feeling the sunny optimism emblematic of the Gipper himself, I felt an overwhelming sense of depression and disappointment. Yet I also felt the opposite of how I assume people […]
★★ When a movie is less than good, it matters less where it lies within the chronological order of its franchise and more how it got to be its way. A little over a decade ago, Fede Alvarez rebooted The Evil Dead (1980). The final product was a misfire worth remembering only for the concentrated […]
★★ Richard Linklater and Glen Powell are not deep thinkers. Hit Man would be a much better film if they understood that. Linklater in particular has never evolved in his musings about life, human needs, and the sense of self after one, no more than two, semesters of college. If he took more than that, […]
★★★½ I don’t believe in the end of history. Count me proudly among those many – left, right, and center – who mocked ol’ Francis Fukuyama for his book, and still adheres to the imperfect, yet far more perceptive word of Fukuyama’s old teacher Samuel Huntington and his response essay The Clash of Civilizations? Back […]
★★★ Nationalism has a place in movies. Indian cinema proves it. No American movie today would have a scene like the flag wave-off in Fighter. To understand why it’s there is to appreciate something about borders. America’s most unfriendly neighbor is a country whose government would never openly declare war, but would happily create a […]
★★★½ The moment DUNC: Part One was over, I wanted Part Two. That was the problem. Now that Part Two has arrived, I can safely say that if we never get Part Three, I will not be disappointed. Is there more to experience? Certainly. But the core story is complete – the themes imparted, and […]
The “Movies of the Century – Year by Year” can be found here. Happy New Year, maybe. It feels strange that we are entering the 25th year of the 21st century, so I guess there should be 24 movies here, but it’s too late now and it’s my list. Continuing last year’s tradition, this is the […]
The tradition continues. What began in the previous year continues through 2023. And if we’re all still alive and able to comprehend the insanity of global and domestic events next year, it will continue again. You will notice some changes to this list, as well as the next one. That’s part of the fun of continuity. As time accrues, […]
I wish someone taught me how to be a critic. Instead I learned how to do it the hard way – by doing it until I was good at it, then doing it more until I realized that I actually wasn’t good at it at all, and then doing it even more. My secondary passion […]
★★★ If this film was Star Wars: Episode VII, no one would have complained about it. With Gareth Edwards’s The Creator joined now by Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, a pair of very good filmmakers who were both in their own ways rejected and spurned by the Disney regime […]
★★★ Godzilla Minus One poses a threat of sorts to Hollywood. America may not fear Japanese business the way it used to, but Hollywood’s creative business of wasting 3x the money to make movies that today look 3x worse than they did 20 years ago has created a vacuum that has long deserved an international […]
★★★★ “The reprimand, if there is to be one, must come from your own conscience.” William Friedkin’s swan song is the year’s greatest film. Cretins will dismiss its sentiments as mere boomer talk, but years from now it will endure for what it is – a mic drop from one of America’s greatest cinematic provocateurs […]
★★ Entering the theater, a question occupied my mind: “what is Ridley Scott’s interest in Napoleon?” While leaving the theater, as the casualty numbers flashed across the screen, it occurred to me that I’m not sure Scott was even interested in Napoleon at all. Actually, I’m not sure Scott was interested in much of anything […]
★½ Martin Scorsese has traded his Catholic guilt for leftist guilt, but even before his lapse he never resorted to propaganda. His new Killers of the Flower Moon combines There Will Be Blood (2007) with Gaslight (1944), but before you get to thinking that I just praised the film, take a seat. Then stay seated […]
★★★ “Sweet Child in time,You’ll see the line,The line that’s drawn between,The good and the bad.“ Seven years ago, Gareth Edwards was betrayed. The Creator proves it. Despite what the kids say, Rogue One is a desecration. The twerps of cinema who insist that they love that movie have its virtues and vices precisely backwards. […]
★½ Have you ever wanted to watch The LEGO Movie, except less interesting, less exciting, less funny, and less fun? How about a dull movie that pretends to be the same kind of exploitative toy commercial that satirizes modernism and conformity, and cannibalizes LEGO in everything from the use of Will Ferrell to the insurgent […]
★★★ If the entire world was destroyed in 1945, at least the commies would go with it. Oppenheimer will not decisively answer the universal questions you bring with you to the big screen. To the extent I can extrapolate an answer from Christopher Nolan himself based upon the story of the film, I suspect that […]
★★ In his elder years, Steven Spielberg, my favorite filmmaker, has outsourced his creative instincts to an inferior. Now that inferior has both politicized and trivialized his own life story, and Spielberg can only play to its hits like a copycat. The Fabelmans is perhaps the least affecting film Spielberg has ever made. So disjointed […]
★★½ Both the good and the bad of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One can be summed up by a sequence early on that told me more about the film than anything else on its own did. A group of government heads are having an intelligence meeting about the central threat – a rogue […]
Creed III is not a Rocky or a Creed movie. It’s a boxing movie that, not unlike Rocky V, disgraces both franchises and star characters at the center. Oh, it’s a fine concept for its own boxing movie. Michael B. Jordan should have directed Jonathan Majors as his own star in his own film with […]
V for Verbatim 