“Where do you want to go?” is the last line of Zero Dark Thirty. It is spoken by a pilot tasked with chartering Maya (Jessica Chastain) to the first destination… Continue reading "Zero Dark Thirty — 10 Years Later (Bigelow, 2012)"
I suspect that viewers will enjoy or esteem The Unmaking of a College to the extent their politics and ideology are compatible with those of the students who organized “the… Continue reading "The Unmaking of a College (Goldstein, 2022)"
I’ve been a Koreeda fan ever since I picked up a VHS tape of Maborosi (1995) from the sale bin of a video outlet. When I started attending the Toronto… Continue reading "Air Doll (Koreeda, 2009)"
I won’t speculate about how Amazon Studios’s Reacher will play for those unfamiliar with Lee Child’s books or fans of the Tom Cruise films based on the same character. I… Continue reading "Reacher"
Can a film be simultaneously essential and disappointing? I ask because I feel like we do need to talk about Cosby — or at least I do. But while the… Continue reading "We Need to Talk About Cosby (Bell, 2022)"
When I was in graduate school (yea, many years ago), I once earned an “A” on a paper from a respected mentor who was hardly a pushover. When I tried… Continue reading "Road to Perth (Peter, 2021)"
The 355 is a new movie only in the sense that it has not been previously released in the United States and is not a remake. Beyond that, it is… Continue reading "The 355 (Kinberg, 2022)"
The theatrical movie experience painfully went away in 2020, and it painfully returned in 2021. Part of what made it so was the realization that I did not miss it… Continue reading "2021 Top 10"
I tell my students that I am a prose guy, not a poetry guy. So the fact that I enjoy PBS’s weekly lessons about famous American poems should reassure anyone… Continue reading "Poetry in America, Season 3"
I have been writing the same review of Erwin films for nearly a decade, so here it is: better than it has to be but not as good as it… Continue reading "American Underdog (Erwin and Erwin, 2021)"
