The Five-Year Engagement (2012)
Relationships are serious business. In most Judd Apatow productions, they’re funny business. With The Five-Year Engagement, there’s romance to be found in surprising places, but the omnipresent feeling...
View ArticleLooper (2012)
I became a Rian Johnson disciple the second that 2006′s Brick ended. I was floored by the originality, the artistic vision, the intelligence, and the creative voice. This was a unique filmmaker and I...
View ArticleSalmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen will likely not be outdone in 2012 for strangest title of a mainstream film release. It is indeed about the crazy idea of brining salmon to an emerging system of rivers in a...
View ArticleYour Sister’s Sister (2012)
Lynn Shelton is quickly becoming one of my favorite indie film artists. Her writing and directorial offerings are somewhat relegated to the fly-on-the-wall hipster “mumblecore” category, but what...
View ArticleEdge of Tomorrow (2014)
I’ve always been one able to separate the art from the artist, so while Tom Cruise may annoy people in real life because he jumped on a couch one summer, that doesn’t halt my enjoyment of the man’s...
View ArticleInto the Woods (2014)
Theater fans, take this review with a Broadway-sized grain of salt because I’m going to admit I’ve never seen Into the Woods prior to its film release. I consider myself a Stephen Sondheim fan,...
View ArticleSicario (2015)
The word “sicario” is Spanish for hitman, we’re told in a helpful opening text. It’s a term that has greater meaning in the landscape of the war on drugs, a war that has ravaged Mexico and its...
View ArticleThe Girl on the Train (2016)
Consider it Gone Girl lite. The adaptation of the mega best-selling thriller The Girl on the Train seems to be on a runaway collision course with irony-free, amped-up melodrama and sundry “adult”...
View ArticleSherlock Gnomes (2018)
It’s been a couple of hours after watching Sherlock Gnomes and I still have alcohol working through my bloodstream (a byproduct of having to watch Sherlock Gnomes) and so I thought why not begin the...
View ArticleA Quiet Place (2018)
I’m going to write a sentence I’ve never written in my history of writing about film: make sure you get all the gas out of your system before sitting down to watch A Quiet Place in the theater. This...
View ArticleMary Poppins Returns (2018)
I have no real investment in Mary Poppins as a character or the original 1964 movie, so I was expecting to walk out of Mary Poppins Returns with a shrug, likely finding it middling at worse. I was...
View ArticleSpiral (2021) / A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
Chris Rock seems like an odd choice to spearhead a revival of the dormant Saw franchise, but the actor was a rabid fan of the grisly horror series and came to producers with an idea for a new Saw...
View ArticleJungle Cruise (2021)
Disney turned a theme park ride that mostly involved sitting into a billion-dollar supernatural adventure franchise, so why not try another swing at reshaping its existing park properties into would-be...
View ArticlePain Hustlers (2023)
Pain Hustlers is the next attempt to dramatize the numerous stories behind the opioid crisis, a storytelling edict that is becoming its own tragic true-crime sub-genre (Dopesick, Pain Killer, Four...
View ArticleOppenheimer (2023)
I finally did it. I watched all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, one half of the biggest movie-going event of 2023, and arguably the most smarty-pants movie to ever gross a billion...
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