With a rare and gratifying exuberance for the abundant possibilities found in genre-based storytelling, writer-director Rian Johnson proved anew his mighty abilities to slyly invert tropes with Knives Out. A modern polish on the twisty mysteries tapped out by Agatha … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — Number Ten
Now that the Academy has weighed in on the top achievements in the cinema for the 2019 calendar — with some suspect choices, I’d say — it’s time for me to do the same. As I usually do, I’ll tick … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2019 — An Introduction
“Congratulations to those men,” Issa Rae said pointedly and gracefully this morning, immediately after listing the five contenders in the directing category for this year’s Academy Awards. The annual announcement of new nominations is always going to be a hash … Continue reading Women Belittled — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Born in Sydney, Australia, Bruce Beresford launched his film career far from home. Though he’d made a few short films while attending university, Beresford found paying work in the entertainment industry hard to come by when he graduated in the … Continue reading Actors’ Director — Bruce Beresford
Robert Altman was considered to be one of the best friends an actor could have. In addition to stacking his casts with craft, unorthodox players, he was known for his generosity with the assembled thespians, giving them room to explore and build characters. Especially after his Player-fueled resurgence in the early nineteen-nineties, actors flocked to him. Tthe posters for his films — whether the finished product was great or dismal — roughly equivalent to stream-of-consciousness lists generated by someone who’d been prompted to name every interesting actor they could think of in thirty seconds. Despite all that, Altman never directed … Continue reading Actors’ Director — An Introduction
Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria, 2019). Based on a New York article, Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers is like Magic Mike with a low-level heist drama applied like glittery eye shadow. A group of exotic dancers at a high-end New York club need to … Continue reading Then Playing — Hustlers; The Lighthouse; Shazam!
We are seeing the very worst of our scientific predictions come to pass in these bushfires by Joëlle Gergis While the U.S. news media is distracted by the geopolitical instability fomented by the moronic lifelong criminal who’s perplexingly still allowed … Continue reading Outside Reading — Terra Australis edition
Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018). In adapting Becky Albertalli’s young adult novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda to the screen, director Greg Berlanti and his collaborators honor the story of a gay teenager coming into his own by structuring … Continue reading Then Playing — Love, Simon; Ad Astra; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
It is an odd, daring experiment to build a film around a protagonist who unfailingly does the wrong thing. In Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a New York City jewelry store proprietor whose skill at garish hucksterism is … Continue reading Now Playing — Uncut Gems
In breaking down Greta Gerwig’s new film version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to its individual components, the natural starting point for evaluation is the faithfulness of the adaptation. Alcott’s novel made its bow a few decades before there … Continue reading Now Playing — Little Women
Coffee for Two 