Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. Lately I’ve been reading … Continue reading Laughing Matters — Robin Williams, “Come Inside My Mind”
There are plenty of gruesome elements to go around in Hereditary, the feature film debut of writer-director Ari Aster. As the title implies, though, the most unsettling portions of the film center on the way family can weigh on a … Continue reading Now Playing — Hereditary
#37 — Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017) It’s tough being a newcomer to a lengthy tale eight parts deep in the telling, with each prior installment adding convolutions to the … Continue reading Greatish Performances #37
Back when I first started penning movie reviews — not just as a personal hobby, but to foist upon Central Wisconsin radio listeners — I made an effort to approach each cinematic offering purely as its own entity, doing the … Continue reading Now Playing — Solo: A Star Wars Story
A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018). Writer-director John Krasinski’s horror film about sonically-attuned, carnivorous creatures is a splendid analogy for the anxieties of child-rearing. It’s also wildly implausible within the confines of its own fictional world, largely because the threats … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — A Quiet Place; All Fall Down; New Wave: Dare to Be Different
This italicized portion usually contains some modern pontificating on the earlier writing presented in this weekly feature. In this instance, though, I have no annotations. This review was written for my former online home. David Cronenberg’s last film was called … Continue reading From the Archive — Eastern Promises
As I’ve done on two prior occasions, I’m using the weekly rifle through old writing to share one of the news segments that always started our weekly movie review program. As usual, I must note that the research and subsequent … Continue reading From the Archive — “And we begin, as always, with the latest in movie news….”
In the early nineteen-nineties, drab psychological thrillers were inescapable at the multiplex. At around the same time, Goldie Hawn clearly felt a need to take her career in a different direction. These situations converged, and it was not pretty. This … Continue reading From the Archive — Deceived
When I was still a kid and started my long, tumultuous relationship with superhero comic books, one particular issue loomed large for me. X-Men #137 was a double-sized offering with a story entitled “The Fate of the Phoenix!” It was … Continue reading Now Playing — Avengers: Infinity War
Jason Reitman has a new movie out this week, reportedly an effort that finds him back on track following a couple widely derided cinematic disasters. When I was first applying my resharpened film critic pencil, I wrote about Reitman’s feature … Continue reading From the Archive — Thank You for Smoking
Coffee for Two 