With the release of Vengeance, character actor B. J. Novak moves into the rank of writer-director-star in the Hollywood hierarchy.  Probably best known for his run on “The Office,” Novak has written and directed episodes of that and other television shows […]

With Nope (a terrible title) being a science fiction / horror film with some sort of flying saucer at its center there was no way I was going to miss this one.  It’s a wild film, and a layered one, ambiguous […]

The Despicable Me films are irrepressibly cute, in a clever, wacky kind of way, and this movie (the fifth in the franchise, not counting a few shorts) continues the tradition.  It’s as clever and fun as the others, and to a […]

“The mission is not what it seems.”  Well, no kidding.  Virtually no suspense / thriller / action / drama made today is what it seems, because trickery and duplicitousness is what filmmakers think audiences want.  Double- and triple-crosses abound in […]

Lately I’ve been reading some of Pauline Kael’s movie criticism.  Kael found fame writing for the New Yorker magazine in the 1960s and some of her long-form reviews linked two or more movies by some common thread in a way […]

Thor and his Asgardian friends are not my favorite denizens of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  And while I am not a religious guy, the notion of extra-terrestrial gods being part of our great cosmos is, when I sit and think […]

To its credit, this suspense drama does not turn into a Southern Gothic melodrama, as I half-feared it would.  To be sure, Where the Crawdads Sing employs typical clichés and stereotypes familiar to the form, yet it does so sparingly and […]

Sequels to box office hits are often inevitable but most don’t occur thirty-six years later.  This belated sequel, however, benefits from that immense time lag to infuse its lead character with experience and maturity and wisdom while still allowing his […]

Taking a beloved (?) character from the Pixar Toy Story franchise and giving him his own prequel story seems like a great idea to me.  Maybe Woody or the Potato Heads will get their own origin stories, too.  Plus, Lightyear is pure […]