Reviews

March 10, 2022

The Batman is a modern noir mess

The story begins on Halloween, almost exactly 20 years after the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. A new killer—an internet sensation, as it turns out—is on the loose, violently ridding Gotham City of its excesses. Continue Reading...

March 03, 2022

Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a dead end

Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape Of Water (2017), a movie infamous for a leading lady so desperate for intimacy that she makes love to a fish, probably the best metaphor for the ongoing moral collapse of the women who like such movies. Continue Reading...

March 02, 2022

Midnight Mass: There is no feast on a fast

Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Continue Reading...

February 24, 2022

Licorice Pizza is the L.A. fairy tale we didn’t know we needed

My series on cinematic nostalgia continues—after Wes Anderson’s Francophilia, Ridley Scott’s Italian farce, and Spielberg’s Puerto Rican fiasco, here’s a California story: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza, the only Hollywood movie made last year with some reason to be remembered. Continue Reading...

February 23, 2022

A new documentary on the life of Kurt Vonnegut is unstuck in time

What would Kurt Vonnegut have made of the accordion-style cycle of lockdowns and other restraints imposed on us by the seemingly permanent American sanitary dictatorship devoted to the religion of health in this the centenary year of his birth? Continue Reading...

February 17, 2022

Steven Spielberg’s woke West Side Story is a self-contradictory disaster

Steven Spielberg has recently made a number of movies nostalgic for midcentury liberalism, Bridge of Spies and The Post, especially, very mediocre stories that won him Oscar nominations and praise in the mainstream press at the price of the popularity he once enjoyed. Continue Reading...

February 10, 2022

Is The Lost Daughter this generation’s A Doll’s House?

In Henrik Ibsen’s seminal play A Doll’s House, protagonist Nora Helmer, a hitherto devoted wife and mother, walks out on her husband and their three children, significantly slamming the door behind her in the last scene. Continue Reading...

February 08, 2022

House of Gucci is Ridley Scott’s “Basta!” to the commercialization of art

My first Oscars essay presented Wes Anderson, the Hollywood dandy’s Francophilia, The French Dispatch, and gentle criticism of liberal intellectual pretense. The 2022 Oscar contenders also include an examination of American Italophilia—veteran Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, as full of today’s stars as Anderson’s movies are of yesteryear’s. Continue Reading...

February 03, 2022

The Scottish play comes alive in imaginative new Joel Coen film

Who needs another version of Macbeth on film? You may find yourself asking this question with the release of director Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which stars Denzel Washington in the title role and, in the part of Lady Macbeth, Coen’s seemingly ubiquitous wife, three-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand. Continue Reading...

February 01, 2022

The French Dispatch is a nostalgic look back at a Paris of the imagination

I offer you a series on Hollywood as seen by its artists, on the occasion of the impending Oscars. I don’t mean the dominant liberal arrogance that has doomed cinema, but rather the efforts of artists who have spent their careers trying to advance a view of America that might bring us together, or at least help prevent us coming apart, the concern of all decent people who have influence. Continue Reading...

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