The Hunger Review
RATING: (2.5 STARS) Get a load of the description for Tony Scott’s debut film, 1983’s The Hunger. From IMDb: “A love triangle develops between a beautiful yet dangerous vampire, her cellist companion, and a gerontologist.” Excuse me? A vampire, cellist, AND a gerontologist? They’re all here AND in the same eternal love triangle? Yes, and […]
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Review
RATING: (2 STARS) Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the fifth Star Wars film in as many years, arrived in theaters before Christmas more with a sense of exhausted obligation than breathless anticipation. It wasn’t just that we’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time in this world lately. The discourse around these films has […]
A Star Is Born (2018) Review
RATING: (4 STARS) Though A Star Is Born has been made now four times, the 2018 version directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper and Lady Gaga (in her first major film performance), is my first experience with these story beats. Of course, they’re not unfamiliar ones. It doesn’t take intimate familiarity with the Janet […]
The James Bond Movies, Ranked
I wrote a version of this list six years ago, shortly after the release of Skyfall, but recent news, and the commentary surrounding it, have had me feeling nostalgia for the series of films that, more than any other, got me interested in and thus writing about film. While Danny Boyle’s exit from “Bond 25” […]
Tower Review
RATING: (4 STARS) On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman opened fire from the observation deck of “The Tower” at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the course of 90 minutes, he shot 32 men and women, killing 14. Earlier that day, he also killed his wife and mother at their respective homes. Tower, a […]
Tallulah Review
RATING: (3 STARS) As I was watching Sian Heder’s Tallulah, I couldn’t shake the implausibility of the premise. A young nomadic woman steals the baby of a rich, careless mother? The film offers a title character who is easy to accept as impulsive and destructive, but a kidnapper? Please. Then something funny happened. I started […]
Zootopia Review
RATING: (3.5 STARS) Zootopia is a perfect 2016 movie. Sure, it depicts a bunny cop and a fox solving a mystery — which is utterly timeless, obviously — but what it does here and how is speak with surprising grace about stereotyping that’s pervaded both the American presidential election and interactions cops and civilians. I […]
How to Fix Hollywood’s Diversity Problem
This week, I had the pleasure of publishing an article for the magazine The Week. In it, I discussed the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and prescribed potential fixes for movie studios, executives, the Academy, and the press that could lead to a truly inclusive Hollywood. It was an honor to write this piece, and I’m extremely grateful […]
The Best Films of 2015
Looking back at my list of the best films of 2014, I led with this statement: “It seems you’re supposed to open your end-of-year favorite films list with an assessment of the movie year as a whole, but I’ve never really been interested in that. Good, bad, or somewhere in between—I have no idea what […]
