When I first saw the trailer for The Carpenter’s Son, the new film loosely based on Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, I confess my heart sank a little. I am old… Continue reading "The Carpenter’s Son: A New Testament Scholar Discusses Controversial Depiction of Jesus"
“Why don’t you just fake the whole show?” Buried in the rubble of the mess that is Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian novel, protagonist Ben Richards (Glen Powell)… Continue reading "The Running Man (Wright, 2025)"
I don’t know if it is accurate to call director François Ozon a critic’s darling, but I note that his last fifteen films, over a span of eighteen years, are… Continue reading "When Fall is Coming (Ozon, 2025)"
The first twenty minutes of Stitch Head is just sublime. In terms of art design, story set-up, and characterization, it is on par with the better Pixar films. The titular… Continue reading "Stitch Head (Hudson, 2025)"
I was mostly ambivalent about The Mission, the 2023 documentary chronicling the attempts of John Chau to evangelize the occupants of North Sentinel Island despite access to the island being… Continue reading "Last Days (Lin, 2025)"
It is hard for me to evaluate Divia, since the element I value most in films, narrative, is at best implied and at worst totally absent. The film’s notes describe… Continue reading "Divia (Hreshko, 2025)"
Blue Moon is a film so dour, so bitter, so devoid of joy or hope or spirit, that even those who praise it have trouble articulating why they are doing… Continue reading "Blue Moon (Linklater, 2025)"
The body-swapping conceit of Good Fortune is tired and overused, but the film’s execution of it is so good that it manages to transcend the constraints of recycling a familiar… Continue reading "Good Fortune (Ansari, 2025)"
Warning–this review mentions plot points that may be considered spoilers. I wrote in a review of One Big Happy Family that films about groups or cultures to which one does… Continue reading "300 Letters (Santa Ana, 2025)"
Roofman is either a morally confused movie or a morally confusing one. The film opens with Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) robbing a McDonald’s with some kind of shotgun, marching the… Continue reading "Roofman (Cianfrance, 2025)"
