We’re doing something a little different around these parts this week.  One of my mutuals on the social media site formerly/still known as Twitter mentioned recently that she was sad so few people discussed older films with her. Folks would chime in with hot takes over the latest MCU installment or indie darling, but by […]

Not long ago, legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott told historians to shut the f–k up. It’s been my experience that one does not tell others to shut the f–k up in a vacuum, not usually. In this case, there was a pretty compelling reason. While promoting his new film Napoleon, Scott was asked in an interview* […]

Is sex necessary in movies? UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers surveyed young people (God, it kills me to say that) aged 10-24 regarding the kinds of stories told through screens.* Respondents aged 13-24 were asked about sexual depiction in movies and television. Over half of them wanted stories with a stronger focus on friendships, […]

Every so often, there’s a narrative around a narrative. Specifically, a movie. Whether it’s positive, negative, or simply strange, sometimes prior to a movie’s release, we start to hear things. Rumors, conjecture, a whisper campaign designed to break a project, lift up a filmmaker, or redirect attention entirely.  One of the most famous examples of […]

Movie critics are supposed to be impartial. That’s the common wisdom, anyway. They’re supposed to descend from their ivory towers, tuck themselves into their chinchilla-furred seats within a perfectly calibrated surround sound screening room, and receive each morsel of cinematic goodness with an equal degree of informed curiosity. That’s what’s supposed to happen. The reality […]

You want to know what scares me? It’s the man with the gun. That isn’t the fun fear of the Halloween season, the entertaining chills we get from ghosts, witches, and silent mask-wearing automatons. Believe me, for my last review of October, I wanted to get into a horror movie that’s clever, entertainingly stupid, fast-paced, […]

Mark my words, in the next week people are going to accuse Martin Scorsese and his film, Killers of the Flower Moon, of being racist. Sexist. Glorifying violence. Exploiting the experiences of Indigenous people. And most annoying of all, of being “woke.” This has happened to Scorsese for decades. He was accused of blasphemy with […]

The endgame of most romantic comedies is to get the couple to “and they lived happily ever after.” Right? After all the meet-cutes, bouncy banter, misunderstandings that could have been easily resolved with a conversation, and tearful reconciliations, it all ends with a kiss and the assumption that the happy couple will walk into the […]

I don’t know if you knew this, but The Creator was released theatrically on September 29 of this year. As I write this, it’s made somewhere in the neighborhood of $32 million. Considering it had a production budget of $80 million, it’ll have to do some work over the next few weeks to break even.  […]

You’ve heard from farty old film critics like me that movies have an excess of excess these days. Gigantic budgets, massive explosions and special effects sequences, and runtimes that would test even the hardiest of bladders. People complain about that now. People complained about those very same things forty years ago.  Sure, I get the […]