October 12, 2024
Where Y’ At
Nola-shot horror flicks.
____________________________________________________________________________
June 5, 2024
Book and Film Globe
An acidly funny satire on killing for fame.
____________________________________________________________________________
April 1, 2024
The Smart Set
How he kept it real.
____________________________________________________________________________
January 12, 2024
Book and Film Globe
Getting Kafkaesque.
____________________________________________________________________________
August 10, 2023
The Smart Set
What the man who liked to watch knew.
_____________________________________________________________________________
July 12, 2023
Book and Film Globe
Peter Bogdanovich’s eerily prescient debut.
_____________________________________________________________________________
June 30, 2023
The Smart Set
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”
_____________________________________________________________________________
December 3, 2022
The Smart Set
“Cinema is truth at 24 frames a second.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
October 19, 2022
Book & Film Globe
Clouzot’s vision of small town fascism.
_____________________________________________________________________________
October 5, 2022
American Purpose
The Wilder touch.
_____________________________________________________________________________
July 11, 2022
Book and Film Globe
The Coen Brothers’ virtuosic third feature.
_____________________________________________________________________________
January 10, 2022
The Smart Set
Conspiracies, empirical truth, and John Travolta.
_____________________________________________________________________________
January 1, 2022
The Arts Fuse
The life (but not so much the work) of Kurt Vonnegut.
_____________________________________________________________________________
September 30, 2021
The Smart Set
What John Carpenter knew about history.
_____________________________________________________________________________
July 1, 2021
The Smart Set
The maestro’s ontology of the carnival.
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 31, 2021
Book and Film Globe
Why go out when you can summer on screen?
____________________________________________________________________________
May 26, 2021
The Baffler
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
A Kafkaesque vision of policing.
____________________________________________________________________________
April 19, 2021
Book and Film Globe
An intriguing modern day adaptation falls flat.
____________________________________________________________________________
February 25, 2021
Book and Film Globe
A long day’s vicarious eating on film.
____________________________________________________________________________
February 5, 2021
Book and Film Globe
Great Bad Phone Calls of Movie History
Hanging on the telephone.
____________________________________________________________________________
February 1, 2021
The Arts Fuse
A man and his monkey.
____________________________________________________________________________
January 28, 2021
The Smart Set
“Hatred breeds hatred.”
____________________________________________________________________________
January 15, 2021
American Purpose
Wise guys demonstrating all-American amorality.
____________________________________________________________________________
September 21, 2020
Book and Film Globe
7 Movies About Life Under Political Conflict
Censorship, fascism, coups, terror, violence, and sunglasses.
____________________________________________________________________________
September 14, 2020
The Smart Set
How the master subversive’s films speak to us now.
____________________________________________________________________________
July 24, 2020
Book and Film Globe
The fine art of politickin’ seen from a few different angles.
____________________________________________________________________________
June 21 , 2020
The American Interest
Gore Vidal’s overlooked political drama about the ethics of mudslinging.
____________________________________________________________________________
May 16 , 2020
The American Interest
The silent Wiemar classic still works its diabolical spell at 100
____________________________________________________________________________
April 5 , 2020
The American Interest
Bette Davis knew the rules of the Hollywood game
____________________________________________________________________________
March 6 , 2020
The American Interest
Who our Norma Desmond is now
____________________________________________________________________________
January 26 , 2020
The Arts Fuse
What Did Jack Do- Lynchian Monkeyshines
A man and a monkey
____________________________________________________________________________
January 7 , 2020
The Arts Fuse
Burrowing through the CIA’s black books
____________________________________________________________________________
December 6, 2019
The Baffler
Clerks at 25
____________________________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________________________
November 1, 2019
The Smart Set
QT’s legacy, from Reservoir Dogs to his return to form
____________________________________________________________________________
September 12, 2019
The Smart Set
Behold the glory of The Criterion Collection, the film archive to beat all film archives
____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 16, 2019
The Smart Set
Brigitte Bardot’s controversial role of a lifetime
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
August 10, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Sorry To Bother You — Engaging Anti-Capitalist Satire
Vividly shot, morally vigorous, and consistently funny
_____________________________________________________________________________
June 22, 2018
The Arts Fuse
Scorsese’s Age of Innocence — Re-released
The privilege Edith Wharton’s characters swim in has not disappeared
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
January 25, 2015
The Arts Fuse
Inherent Vice — Like an Acid Trip, Secondhand
A giddy, trippy potpourri
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________________________
December 20, 2014
Love Money Clothes
Chris Rock Gives Us His Top Five
The great comedian makes his directorial debut
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
September 17, 2014
Love Money Clothes
A sullen square-off between two gruff, stoic leading men
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
July 11, 2014
Love Money Clothes
A Vampire Film that Lacks Bite
Jarmusch’s film makes some interesting choices, but doesn’t fully deliver
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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?
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
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
_____________________________________________________________________________
July 31, 2008
Flak Magazine
9 Ways of Looking at the Joker
Let us count the character’s wicked ways