Emanuel (2019)
Emanuel is the sort of reverential documentary that is pointless to criticize yet hardly allows for ambivalent praise. At the root of my ambivalence, I suspect, is the age-old difficulty… Continue reading "Emanuel (2019)"
Emanuel is the sort of reverential documentary that is pointless to criticize yet hardly allows for ambivalent praise. At the root of my ambivalence, I suspect, is the age-old difficulty… Continue reading "Emanuel (2019)"
For those who don’t know Shakespeare, or only know him superficially, the title “All is True” may sound more like an assertion than an inside joke. The film implies, without… Continue reading "All is True (Branagh, 2019)"
Late Night is a film so affable and so relentlessly competent that I spent a full day after screening it trying to convince myself that I liked it. I didn’t.… Continue reading "Late Night (2019)"
One can’t study J. R. R. Tolkien for very long without encountering his preface to The Lord of the Rings in which he rejects forcefully any interpretations of that work… Continue reading "Tolkien (Karukoski, 2019)"
It’s been roughly four years (and a rough four years) since I gave a 1 1/2 star review to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Since then, I have admitted to liking… Continue reading "Captain Marvel (Boden and Fleck)"
I first encountered the political career of Barack Obama not through a convention speech or town hall debate but through Bob Hercules’s Senator Obama Goes to Africa. I won’t say… Continue reading "Time for Ilhan (Shapiro, 2018)"
When M. Night Shyamalan’s Split met with favorable reviews in 2016, I wondered pretty openly whether or not the film’s twist left a fresher taste in viewer’s mouths than the… Continue reading "Glass (Shyamalan, 2019)"
The Weight of Success is mostly a missed opportunity to explore the important topic of whether or not life coaching and/or psychology work and the more important topic of whether… Continue reading "The Weight of Success (Silverstein, 2018)"
Unfortunately, in order to drive the film to the expected ringside confrontations, Creed II erases much of the nuanced character development of the original.
Keira Knightley’s performance as Sugar Plum in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is probably my favorite camp performance since Johnny Depp introduced us all to Captain Sparrow. Whether she… Continue reading "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (Hallstrom and Johnston)"