#32 — Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012) Violence begets violence. In the longstanding cinematic algebra that posits the swinging of fists and the pulling of triggers as the readiest and surest solutions to all manner of problems — such as the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 10s — Number Thirty-Two
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
I’m fairly confident Rian Johnson considers himself a traditionalist, in defiance of any evidence to the contrary. Beginning with his first feature, Brick, Johnson settled into a mode of taking a well-worn, largely bygone subgenre and spinning it around until … Continue reading Now Playing — Knives Out
#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
It’s been a little more than forty years since simple letters in a crystal blue font first informed audiences they were about to see a story that happened in a distant galaxy quite some time earlier. Conceived and directed by … Continue reading Now Playing — Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Recent weeks have seen an online avalanche of top ten lists from movie critics of all stripes. I live in the frigid north, however, and it takes certain cinematic offerings a little longer to fight their way through the sleet and … Continue reading From the Archive: Top Ten Movies of 2006
There’s no getting around it: I’m a sucker for the films of Rian Johnson. I loved his debut feature and his sophomore effort, sometimes feeling like an isolated supporter of the latter. There’s a crispness to his writing and an … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Three
I greatly admire the construction of Rian Johnson’s screenplay for Looper. It’s not that he took on the daunting task of building a story around time travel and emerged with something that doesn’t collapse under unsolvable conundrums of logic, an … Continue reading Oh, you’re drivin’ me out of my mind
It’s no mystery why filmmakers are drawn to stories about heists and con artists. The grifters that populate these stories employ a similar artistry to directors and screenwriters and everyone else who collaborates on cinematic offerings, building fictions compelling enough … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Three
She barely says a word. As Bang Bang in Rian Johnson’s second feature, The Brothers Bloom, Rinko Kikuchi does not have the benefit of hefty monologues that plumb her character’s soul, nor does she get the sort of clever, stylized … Continue reading Class of 2009 Supporting Actress Blogathon: Rinko Kikuchi in The Brothers Bloom
Coffee for Two 