film
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a very smart movie masquerading as a very dumb one. The film is a testament to the pull of Nicolas Cage's cult hero persona, warping the very film itself from a thoughtful, self-aware indie dramedy into the kind of absurd
film
Film is the engine of paranoia. In the 1970's director Alan J. Pakula created what has been called his "Paranoia Trilogy": Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), and All the President's Men (1976). These three films, taken together, do in fact tell us a
film
For my Unpopular Opinion of the Day, I would like to propose that Star Wars (the whole of it) is bad where films like Barbarella and, slightly more self-consciously, Flash Gordon are good films. Barbarella is genius not because it's more ridiculous fun than Star Wars (which
television
Fishing with John is a fishing show by and for people who don't care about fishing, at least not in the grand scheme of things. The real story is the cosmos. But now that everything old is new again -- or should that be everything you think is new
film
Like most people in the COVID era, I think a lot about space. Not outer space, like the wealthy elites preparing to flee the climate change they've brought on the world, but physical space, the kind we inhabit every day. Perhaps more than any other film genre, it&
biopic
One of the biggest triumphs of The Social Network is that is actually captures the anxiety of social networking. Less a glowing portrait than a grim dissection of the mythology of Mark Zuckerberg, played with vicious solipsism by Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is that rare biopic that is truly
Newsletter
With everyone talking about the 30th anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs, I thought I'd take a second to discuss what I think is the single worst legacy of the film. It's not the propagation of transgender stereotypes through the character of Buffalo Bill; as
horror
The traditional disaster movie is deeply personal: individuals struggling against an environment, human-made or otherwise, that turns against them. The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Airplane!, its dying breath Titanic. Then cinema seemed to collectively zoom out: Independence Day, Mars Attacks, Armageddon, Deep Impact. Suddenly what might have once
trans
The most prominent thought I had as I watched Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-nominated A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica, 2017) was how literate the film is in transgender cinema compared to other transgender films I watch. As Marina (Daniela Vega) is thrust through a gauntlet of transphobia following the