Film

October 12, 2024

Where Y’ At

Nola Halloween Movies

Nola-shot horror flicks.

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June 5, 2024

Book and Film Globe

To Die For

An acidly funny satire on killing for fame.

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April 1, 2024

The Smart Set

On Marlon Brando

How he kept it real.

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January 12, 2024

Book and Film Globe

Orson Welles’ The Trial 

Getting Kafkaesque.

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August 10, 2023

The Smart Set

On Hitchcock

What the man who liked to watch knew.

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July 12, 2023

Book and Film Globe

Targets

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

On Godard

“Cinema is truth at 24 frames a second.”

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October 19, 2022

Book & Film Globe

Le Corbeau

Clouzot’s vision of small town fascism.

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October 5, 2022

American Purpose

On Billy Wilder

The Wilder touch.

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July 11, 2022

Book and Film Globe

Miller’s Crossing

The Coen Brothers’ virtuosic third feature.

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January 10, 2022

The Smart Set

Blow Out 

Conspiracies, empirical truth, and John Travolta.

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January 1, 2022

The Arts Fuse

Unstuck in Time

The life (but not so much the work) of Kurt Vonnegut.

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September 30, 2021

The Smart Set

The Fog

What John Carpenter knew about history.

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July 1, 2021

The Smart Set

On Fellini 

The maestro’s ontology of the carnival.

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May 31, 2021

Book and Film Globe

Summer Movies 

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

Dorian Gray on Instagram

An intriguing modern day adaptation falls flat.
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February 25, 2021

Book and Film Globe

Eating Out At The Movies 

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

The Cameraman

A man and his monkey.
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January 28, 2021

The Smart Set

La Haine 

“Hatred breeds hatred.”
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January 15, 2021

American Purpose

Goodfellas at 30

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

Luis Bunuel’s Surrealism

How the master subversive’s films speak to us now.
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July 24, 2020

Book and Film Globe

8 Movies About Campaigning 

The fine art of politickin’ seen from a few different angles.
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June 21 , 2020

The American Interest

The Best Man

Gore Vidal’s overlooked political drama about the ethics of mudslinging.
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May 16 , 2020

The American Interest

A Century of Dr. Caligari

The silent Wiemar classic still works its diabolical spell at 100
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April 5 , 2020

The American Interest

All About Eve 

Bette Davis knew the rules of the Hollywood game
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March 6 , 2020

The American Interest

Sunset Boulevard at 70

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

The Report- History Ignored 

Burrowing through the CIA’s black books
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December 6, 2019

The Baffler

Why Clerks Still Works 

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

Once Upon A Time…In Tarantino

QT’s legacy, from Reservoir Dogs to his return to form

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September 12, 2019

The Smart Set

Meeting All the Criterion

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

La Verite- Handling the Truth 

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

The Barman Cometh

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