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 […]
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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) ☆ ☆
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 […]
Continue reading »Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) ☆ ☆ ☆
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 […]
Continue reading »Top Gun: Maverick (2022) ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2
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 […]
Continue reading »Lightyear (2022) ☆ ☆ ☆
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 […]
Continue reading »Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) ☆
I suspected that I would hate this movie before I saw it, and of course I was right. I know someone who watched it and then complained that she didn’t understand any of it, or why it was made. And […]
Continue reading »C’mon C’mon (2021) ☆
Although they are manufactured and designed to be seen by wide audiences motion pictures lead to very personal reactions. Sometimes they are wonderfully positive, but sometimes they are overwhelmingly negative, and that can have little to do with the filmmaker. […]
Continue reading »13 Minutes (2021) ☆ ☆ ☆
Those who know me know that I thrill to disaster movies. Always have, probably always will. 13 Minutes is a disaster movie, chronicling the arrival in an Oklahoma town of a massive tornado — yet the tornado itself is not […]
Continue reading »Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) ☆ ☆ ☆
Few movie series have ever been as popular, influential or profitable as the Jurassic Park / World double trilogy. Dinosaurs are the reason, of course, but also because of the top talent recruited to make the films as impactful as possible. […]
Continue reading »The Phantom of the Open (2021) ☆ ☆ ☆
It is rare that I go to a theatre to see a movie of which I have never heard anything, but that is the case with The Phantom of the Open, a British comedy based upon true events of the 1970s […]
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