April 1, 2024 
The Smart Set
How he kept it real.
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January 12, 2024
Book and Film Globe
Getting Kafkaesque.
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August 10, 2023 
The Smart Set
What the man who liked to watch knew.
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July 12, 2023 
Book and Film Globe
Peter Bogdanovich’s eerily prescient debut.
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June 30, 2023 
The Smart Set
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”
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December 3, 2022 
The Smart Set
“Cinema is truth at 24 frames a second.”
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October 19, 2022 
Book & Film Globe
Clouzot’s vision of small town fascism.
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October 5, 2022 
American Purpose
The Wilder touch.
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July 11, 2022 
Book and Film Globe
The Coen Brothers’ virtuosic third feature.
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January 10, 2022 
The Smart Set
Conspiracies, empirical truth, and John Travolta.
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January 1, 2022
The Arts Fuse
The life (but not so much the work) of Kurt Vonnegut.
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September 30, 2021 
The Smart Set
What John Carpenter knew about history.
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July 1, 2021 
The Smart Set
The maestro’s ontology of the carnival.
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May 31, 2021 
Book and Film Globe
Why go out when you can summer on screen?
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May 26, 2021 
The Baffler
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
A Kafkaesque vision of policing.
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April 19, 2021 
Book and Film Globe
An intriguing modern day adaptation falls flat.
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February 25, 2021 
Book and Film Globe
A long day’s vicarious eating on film.
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February 5, 2021 
Book and Film Globe
Great Bad Phone Calls of Movie History
Hanging on the telephone.
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February 1, 2021 
The Arts Fuse
A man and his monkey.
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January 28, 2021 
The Smart Set
“Hatred breeds hatred.”
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January 15, 2021 
American Purpose
Wise guys demonstrating all-American amorality.
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September 21, 2020 
Book and Film Globe
7 Movies About Life Under Political Conflict
Censorship, fascism, coups, terror, violence, and sunglasses.
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September 14, 2020 
The Smart Set
How the master subversive’s films speak to us now.
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July 24, 2020 
Book and Film Globe
The fine art of politickin’ seen from a few different angles.
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June 21 , 2020 
The American Interest
Gore Vidal’s overlooked political drama about the ethics of mudslinging.
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May 16 , 2020
The American Interest
The silent Wiemar classic still works its diabolical spell at 100
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April 5 , 2020 
The American Interest
Bette Davis knew the rules of the Hollywood game
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March 6 , 2020 
The American Interest
Who our Norma Desmond is now
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January 26 , 2020
The Arts Fuse
What Did Jack Do- Lynchian Monkeyshines
A man and a monkey
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January 7 , 2020
The Arts Fuse
Burrowing through the CIA’s black books
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December 6, 2019 
The Baffler
Clerks at 25
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November 25, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
The Irishman- A Blood Soaked Cautionary Tale
The Irishman offers a bleak demonstration of what happens when you sell your soul for too little
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November 1, 2019 
The Smart Set
QT’s legacy, from Reservoir Dogs to his return to form
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September 12, 2019 
The Smart Set
Behold the glory of The Criterion Collection, the film archive to beat all film archives
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August 2, 2019 
The American Interest
The Populist Parable of A Face in the Crowd
A prescient warning about the power of demagogues, which remains all too relevant over 60 years later
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June 26, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
Rolling Thunder Revue- Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan Story
Scorsese’s music documentaries are often as powerful as his fictional work
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May 16, 2019 
The Smart Set
Brigitte Bardot’s controversial role of a lifetime
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May 14, 2019
The American Interest
The Magnificent Ambersons and the Age of Disruption
Welles’s underrated classic is a prophecy about technology and its discontents
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March 15, 2019 
The Arts Fuse
To Sleep With Anger- The Devil’s Temptations
A lost masterpiece from the great cinema underdog Charles Burnett _____________________________________________________________________________
February 21, 2019
The Smart Set
A Brief Escape- On Brief Encounter
For Valentine’s Day- a very British affair and the greatest unrequited love story of them all _____________________________________________________________________________
January 3, 2019 
The Smart Set
Bull Durham- All-Star Flirtation
On Maturity, Sexuality, Intellection, Sports, and Kevin Costner’s emotive cheekbones
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August 10, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Sorry To Bother You — Engaging Anti-Capitalist Satire
Vividly shot, morally vigorous, and consistently funny
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June 22, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Scorsese’s Age of Innocence — Re-released
The privilege Edith Wharton’s characters swim in has not disappeared
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February 19, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Film Review: The Shape of Water — A Dissenting View
Del Toro creates a visually intriguing world, but the story’s premise is too far-fetched to work
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December 20, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Film Review: Chasing Trane — Telling the Story of a Jazz Legend
This documentary about John Coltrane serves up skillful, sensitive storytelling and an appropriate sense of reverence
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August 8, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Film Review: I Called Him Morgan — A Superb Jazz Documentary
The biopic has been lauded as one of the best films of the year, and rightfully so
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June 13, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Tickling Giants- Satire As It Should Be
If you want to see what courageous political satire really looks like, see Sara Taksler’s engaging new documentary about “The Jon Stewart of Egypt.”
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March 28, 2017
The Arts Fuse
Canoa: A Shameful Memory — A Masterpiece of Mexican Political Cinema
A little-known classic about the horror of history, made all the more plausibly frightening because it is based on a true story
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January 30, 2017
The Arts Fuse
The Executioner — Death Be Not Pedestrian
In this 1963 masterpiece, Luis García Berlanga entertainingly but ruthlessly lampoons the cruelties and absurdities of Spanish life under dictatorship
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April 23, 2016
The Arts Fuse
Jazz Trumpeters Miles Davis and Chet Baker — Dueling Biopics
The real advantage Born to Be Blue has over Miles Ahead is that it uses the music as a way to get into its title character’s soul
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August 13, 2015
The Arts Fuse
The End of the Tour — David Foster Wallace Done Right
In true DFW style, the ironic, meta-fictional qualities of the film don’t remain a hall of mirrors but turn into a bridge that conveys its subject’s honest, painful humanity
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April 30, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Slow West : The Western Epic Redux — and Reduced
Plenty of visual interest, but doesn’t seem to be able to settle on what story it wants to tell
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January 25, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Inherent Vice — Like an Acid Trip, Secondhand
A giddy, trippy potpourri
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January 15, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Foxcatcher — Sports and the Pathology of the 1%
Of all the cinematic indictments of the 1% that have flooded the multiplex in the wake of the financial crisis, Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher stands as one of the most understated
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December 20, 2014
Love Money Clothes
Chris Rock Gives Us His Top Five
The great comedian makes his directorial debut
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November 25, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth – A Paranoiac Fever Dream
Among the most haunting aspects is the visceral depiction of Shakespearean violence
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September 17, 2014
Love Money Clothes
A sullen square-off between two gruff, stoic leading men
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July 28, 2014
The Arts Fuse
A Hard Day’s Night — Still Fun After Five Decades
A Hard Day’s Night stands as a landmark in rock history because it exemplifies the joyously innocent starting point of the Beatles
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July 11, 2014
Love Money Clothes
A Vampire Film that Lacks Bite
Jarmusch’s film makes some interesting choices, but doesn’t fully deliver
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June 1, 2014
The Arts Fuse
A Volume That Explains Why Movie Moments Are Memorable
At times, David Thomson’s movie criticism resembles the approach of old-school British critics (the Walter Pater or John Ruskin variety) who didn’t mind occasionally cutting loose from being erudite to wax lyrical
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May 10, 2014
Love Money Clothes
Free Your Mind and Your Grill Will Follow: A Review of Jon Favreau’s ‘Chef’
A cheerfully superficial tale of dishing up life in the food truck
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March 23, 2014
The Arts Fuse
Tales of Intransigence — A Ribald Road Movie at the Boston Turkish Film Festival
Centered on the acting talents of the late Tuncel Kurtiz, the film is a ribald, engaging, and briskly-paced concoction of improvisation and folklore
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March 21, 2014
Love Money Clothes
The Concierge Also Rises: A Review of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel
Ultra- quirky Wes Anderson has an opulent ball in Gilded Age Europe
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February 20, 2014
The Arts Fuse
The Monuments Men — Saving Great Art from the Nazis
If George Clooney can rev up our righteous indignation decrying the barbarities of Joe McCarthy, why on earth couldn’t he become eloquent when it comes to talking about fighting to keep Hitler’s mitts off Michelangelo?
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August 3, 2011
The Millions
Ecstatic Truth: Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
You don’t have to question Herzog’s honesty in watching his films, though you might start to question his sanity
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July 8, 2011
The Millions
Eye of the Beholder: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Critical reaction to The Tree of Life has been decidedly garrulous. A vast majority of reviewers have invoked some kind of “higher” culture to signify the elusive mood or feeling it evokes
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July 31, 2008
Flak Magazine
9 Ways of Looking at the Joker
Let us count the character’s wicked ways