When last we left King Kong in Kong: Skull Island…well, I don’t really remember. Skull Island was some sort of Truman Show-style imprisonment dome, and there was a plot to kill Kong, who was misunderstood, but he survived. Now, when last we left Godzilla in Godzilla: King of the Monsters…uh, there was a plot to […]
Author: Jason McKiernan
French Exit
In this ridiculously long – some might say “endless” – Oscar season, French Exit was originally positioned as a sure-fire Best Actress vehicle for Michelle Pfeiffer, a standout role that could potentially deliver an Oscar win to the three-time past nominee. As the COVID-impacted release calendar started to fill, however, the film – and thus, […]
Nobody
The ongoing John Wick-ification of cinema continues with Nobody, which extrapolates the base premise of the Wick franchise to its truest realization: a really, really normal guy who kicks the ass of everyone in his path. 2014’s original John Wick was about a seemingly regular guy being forcefully pulled back down into a seedy underworld […]
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a seminal text in feminist literature. Published in 1892, it has been a hallmark of feminist literary theory and discourse in the century-plus since its creation. The first-person account of a woman going mad as a result of the confinement of patriarchal oppression remains one the most profound […]
Somewhere with No Bridges
Martha’s Vineyard is the largest island on the East Coast that isn’t connected to any bridges. That intriguing factoid, conveyed at the beginning of Somewhere with No Bridges, explains the title right up front, but also opens a window into the film’s exploration of a cloistered community. A documentary that pieces together fragments of various […]
Coming 2 America
Most enduring about 1988’s Coming to America is how endearing it is despite its perceived flaws. It’s a very simple fish-out-of-water tale, though one that succeeds on the earnest goodwill of its performers. It’s a little overlong as it parcels screen time to an expansive ensemble cast, but cutting it down would deny us some […]
Tom & Jerry
If Tom & Jerry feels retro, that isn’t because it harkens back to the gleeful anarchy of the duo’s original animated shorts, since it rarely does. Instead, this slapdash cinematic lark feels like a holdover from another era, lost in a time capsule of style and perspective. It might most resemble the late-‘90s/early-‘00s string of […]
The Father
In the latter years of my grandfather’s life, he began to exhibit some mild signs of dementia but, mercifully, it never deteriorated beyond that. He wandered into confusion, but never drifted so deep that he couldn’t be reeled back. Florian Zeller’s The Father is all about that tragic drift, inexorable and all-consuming, memories and perceptions […]
Nomadland
Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland traverses both the physical and philosophical implications of a very specific cultural bubble: the culture of willful itinerants, those individuals who live off the grid, untethered to anything permanent, the antithesis of what most of us would consider “normal.” The film’s title craftily lends this lifestyle its own spatial resonance in modern […]
Minari
Minari is a simple plant, sometimes referred to as “water celery.” It’s a wild green that’s bountiful growth makes it ubiquitous in East Asian cooking, particularly in Korean cuisine. That growth makes it uniquely special – its seeds will grow anywhere, even in what would appear to be inhospitable environments. The America of present day […]
Malcolm & Marie
Malcolm & Marie is a sneaky reflection on the current quarantined state of the world, a chamber drama in which the chamber is about to explode from the combustible heat of the escalating tension between the two central characters. Shot over the course of two weeks in summer 2020, the film is, at least in […]
PVT Chat
PVT Chat is well-meaning but obvious, a quasi-intriguing short film concept that uncomfortably stretches itself to feature length, oblivious to the fact that its plot is padded and its points are transparent after the first five minutes. It’s also painfully self-defeating, since this film about the psycho-sexual disconnect that can develop between media and its […]
Promising Young Woman
How could a film this palpably angry be so gleefully entertaining? How could a film that is, ostensibly, a disturbing tragedy be so compulsively watchable? Such is the mystifying brilliance of Promising Young Woman, so deft in its navigation of conflicting styles and contradictory thematic emotions that it’s something of a miracle. Odd to feel […]
1917
Incredible ambition and impeccable craft are, at once, the engines that propel 1917 and the brakes that keep it from reaching takeoff speed. It’s a fascinating frustration, this film so meticulously constructed that the construction dominates the viewing experience, consuming whatever narrative power might otherwise exist in a more traditional film form – the storytelling […]
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is anticipated as “The Mister Rogers Movie,” an understandable expectation with since the TV icon’s legend has grown in the 16 years since his death, and exponentially so within the last five, as the country has entered a period of such hatred and division that many of us wish […]
Knives Out
Rian Johnson works in the precise art of cinematic surprise. One of the great, under-appreciated joys of sitting in that dark room looking up at that bright screen is its ability to surprise us, and Johnson relishes the opportunity to leverage that power like a magician. It makes sense, then, that the notion of magic […]
Charlie’s Angels (2019)
It’s 2019, which means every week we must have a new IP reboot to release on 4,000 screens. This week’s submission is Charlie’s Angels, the latest attempt to kick-start a franchise based on the iconic late-’70s glam-a-rama detective series. Apparently “reboot” is not a word the film’s marketing team is willing to use, insisting that […]
The Report
The Report serves as proof that a film can achieve total moral clarity and still come off as such a sanctimonious screed that you want to check its sources when you leave the screening room. All the facts check out, obviously, since the source in question is the eponymous report – the U.S. Senate Committee […]
Pain and Glory
Pedro Almodovar’s films thrive on the imbalance between brash idiosyncrasy and eloquent introspection. The Spanish auteur is a master of carefully-controlled chaos, of purposefully overwrought melodrama presented against a brightly colored backdrop with a winking nod to the inherent zaniness, somehow kept earthbound by its melancholic thematic underpinnings. Almodovar’s canvas elevates from the screen, but […]
Black and Blue
Black and Blue is a racial polemic that could only be made in this modern world we live in – which is to say, it’s the kind of high-key potboiler that can jackhammer its way into the conversation in our toxic atmosphere. It’s an angry film, but not in the complex manner of a Spike […]