Steven Spielberg is the dream director for the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One. He’s also arguably a terrible choice for the near-future cotton candy dystopia of a puzzle quest across a virtual landscape of pop culture … Continue reading Now Playing — Ready Player One
These days, The Washington Post is demonstrating no reluctance in their insistence on the primacy of a free and robust press in a healthy republic. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto emblazoned on their masthead in a direct rebuke … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2017 — Number Eight
Even without director Steven Spielberg offering fairly unequivocal explanations of his motivation behind signing on for The Post — and working overtime to deliver a finished product as quickly as possible — it’s not difficult to ascertain the film’s sharp … Continue reading Now Playing — The Post
I find it a little remarkable that I have no reviews of Steven Spielberg films from the time I cohosted the movie review show on college radio station WWSP-90FM. During the time our program was airing weekly, the prolific filmmaker signed his name to exactly one directorial effort: Hook, released in 1991. Given when it landed on the release calendar, it’s possible we didn’t even cover it on the show. (A December 11th release date means we could have already been off in correlation to the school’s winter break). Instead, in order to populate the “From the Archive” feature with … Continue reading From the Archive: Munich
Amazingly for a director who used to routinely face a barrage of critical darts for a supposed inability to progress past the childish stuff of frothy fantasy, Steven Spielberg has become one of the most dependable cinematic chroniclers of the planet’s tumultuous history. Across the last decade, with the odd exceptions of a misguided Indiana Jones sequel and a diversion into computer animation, Spielberg has been filming in the past. That’s not an entirely newfound preoccupation, of course. Even before Munich, which I’m using as the dividing line ahead of this era of Spileberg’s filmmaking, Spielberg kept cycling back to historical … Continue reading We don’t know the meaning of fear, we play every minute by ear
With all my papers still packed up for transit, I’m still relying on my former online home for this weekly dive into the archive. And we’ll use this week’s release schedule to help narrow down what’s selected. The first portion … Continue reading From the Archive: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
As if Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t already deserve countless plaudits for his transformative performance as the sixteenth President of the United States in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, it seems his reluctance to take on the role–noting that reluctance to take on a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2012 — Number Ten
In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis moves on from acting to alchemy. The two-time Oscar-winner is hardly prolific (he’s made only ten films since collecting that first Academy Award, for My Left Foot, a film now twenty-three years old), but … Continue reading Everything sticks until it goes away
#18 — Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) First, a consideration of the pleasure and reward of a perfectly chosen line of dialogue. One of the most famed elements of Steven Spielberg’s sophomore feature film, Jaws, is the way that the technical … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eighteen
#26 — Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) In 1990, film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took a break from flinging their thumbs around in judgment and created a television special called The Future of the Movies which included lengthy interviews with Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. At one point, Spielberg was asked to name the single shot from all his movies that exemplified who he was as a filmmaker, the one image that could be pulled out and held up to convey the defining characteristics of his artistic philosophy, temperament and vision. It … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Six
