★★ 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 […]
★★½ Let me start with this. Good Will Hunting is an Oscar satire. It’s a fine – if incomplete – movie in its own right, but when you look at it from a distance, two things stand out. The first is that Matt Damon had mired himself in way too many Zinn-ified revisionisms and pre-Revolutionary […]
★★★★ “One of these days, it’s just gonna be like…” *cocks machine gun I never liked The Office – mainly because I never found it to be as consistently funny as Office Space. The target is generally the same, but Mike Judge did in an hour and a half what that show couldn’t do in […]
★★★★ Schindler’s List should be remembered for more than just being a Holocaust movie. It takes more than simply depicting a violent historical subject to make a film as magnificent as Schindler’s List is. Steven Spielberg may have been personally drawn to the subject, but the story he actually told with his 1993 black & […]
★★ Usually a movie that gets two stars from me gets it because despite my disappointment with it, I’m unable to care enough to downgrade its score further. But there is another kind of 2-star picture – the kind that wildly swings between very strong high points and other moments that are so pathetic that […]
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published on the Cinematic Katzenjammer in March, 2019. ★★★★ “Consequences,” a character says to another. “Consequences,” the second character replies. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum feels like one gigantic set of consequences for the series, in spite of the fact that very little of it is truly explained. […]
★★★ 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 […]
Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. In these dark times we find ourselves in, a day like that prompts a useful reminder that Lincoln should not just be celebrated for his idealistic qualities, his speeches, or his being the leader of the North. He should be celebrated, respected, and even admired for his darker deeds. No […]
V for Verbatim 