As the movie ended and the credits rolled, the theater emptied out fast, as if the audience couldn’t wait to escape. I don’t think Phantom Thread went over well with my fellow moviegoers, and after they left, I sat in the empty auditorium and watched the credits and pondered what I thought. I knew...
Tom Hanks! Meryl Streep! Steven Spielberg directing! A political drama in the Age of Trump the reminds us of the importance of Freedom of the Press and the duty for news organizations to make public what the government wants kept secret! I went to The Post with high expectations. I didn’t expect a good...
The Boatman is a Western, but it’s unlike any other Western you’ve had seen. It’s set in modern times, so it belongs in the Contemporary Western genre with such films as No Country for Old Men, Brokeback Mountain, and last year’s Wind River. Unlike those movies, though, The Boatman is a low-budget independent film...
Directed and written by Terrence Malick, 2017’s Song to Song is an experimental film. If you take one thing away from this review, take that. It’s an experiment, and with any artistic experiment, you, the viewer, will either love it or hate it, think it’s innovative and fresh or think it a waste of...
I missed the opening crawl, because some idiot stepped in front of me during it–not once, but twice. I lost my place the first time, and just as I was finding it, he cut in front of me again. And stood there! By the time he moved on, the crawl was over. I hear...
Netflix has changed their rating system, so instead of rating a movie on a scale of 1-to-5 stars, I must decide a thumb up or down. That works well for movies that I really love or for movies I really hate, but what about movies that I don’t hate enough to regret watching but...
The opening credits justified the admission dollars. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, because who comes just to see the opening credits? But I went to a matinee and received an early bird discount, so there were fewer dollars to justify before I felt I got my money’s worth. As Sigrid sings “Everybody Knows,”...
My movie reviews tend to come in three flavors: positive, negative, and neutral. Or in hand symbols: thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or the ambivalent hand wiggle people do to show something is so-so. I’ll give Murder on the Orient Express that hand wiggle to show that it’s so-so, but unlike my other neutral reviews, I have...
The 1977 Italian movie Suspiria is a masterpiece of Eurohorror. I’m don’t recall where I read that quotation, and I won’t even swear under oath that I’m remembering it verbatim, but I remember the word masterpiece, and I remember Eurohorror, because it’s the first time I’ve seen the word. What I didn’t remember, until...
When I went into the theater to see Thor: Ragnarok, I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve seen a trailer or two, so I knew Hulk was in it. But I haven’t read over the cast list or seen any press release. That’s the norm for me; I prefer going into a movie ignorant....
