★★★ 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 […]
★★★ “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 […]
★★★ 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 […]
★★★ 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 […]
★★★ “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. […]
★★★ 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 […]
★★★ There are multiple moments where John Wick: Chapter 4 looks to be setting itself up to underwhelm, disappoint, or settle for less. Then it defies itself. The series has grown to the point that it makes order out of consequences, and Chapter 4 traverses four separate continents and the greatest number of intercontinental miles […]
★★★ “I don’t think we should be governing ourselves. What we need is a king, and every now and then if the king’s not doing a good job, we kill him.” – George Carlin Here comes an unsurprising statement that my future obituarist will put as the subheading right after “widely beloved murderer of pineapple […]
★★★ I’m probably supposed to hate this film. Readers familiar with me know that while I understand the genuine fears individuals have when they encounter the police uniform, I despise and would celebrate the demise of that certain organization whose trite three-word slogan is also its proper noun title. And the very first thing Malcolm […]
Welcome to Ten for Ten – the segment I promised late last year where yours truly would write ten essays on ten films, and the only thing they have in common is that I love the films but have never written about them before. Additional rules are as follows: no more than two films from […]
★★★ The moment DUNC was finished, I really wanted Part Two. That was the problem. It is a testament to the skill of Denis Villeneuve, the production crews, Hans Zimmer, and the sound producers to make such worlds, planets, environments, and surfaces come alive in a grandiose fashion that mirrors (albeit more by suggestion than […]
V for Verbatim 