James Gray’s Ad Astra is mesmerizing. This quiet, big-budget sci-fi drama isn’t simply interested in space as the new frontier for exploration and the good of humanity. Instead, Ad Astra makes sure the inner self is just as important as…
Quentin Tarantino Comes Home in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
It’s been almost 30 years since Quentin Tarantino first hit the indie scene like a neutron bomb with his debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992) and since then he’s made many names for himself. To some he’s a genius and enfant…
‘Once Upon A Time in Hollywood’ teaser is strangely sunshiny
“That was the best acting I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Once upon a time in Hollywood, there were megastars and mayhem. Seriously, read the stories about the place in the late ‘60s. But in the first footage for…
10 Years Later: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Considering that the very title of Andrew Dominik’s 2007 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford spoils a major plot event in the film, it wouldn’t be totally unbefitting of me to start this piece with a…
Movie Review: Allied
Despite what the marketing has displayed, the big revelation regarding Marion Cotillard’s character in Allied occurs almost halfway through the film. There’s plenty of palpable suspense during the first act, but knowing this information beforehand did damper any questions about…
Movie Review: Voyage of Time (Life’s Journey, The IMAX Experience)
Somewhere between his debut feature Badlands and this year’s Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick peeled conventional narrative from his films; his work became unashamedly naked. Malick’s new modest opus, Voyage of Time, is a radical diversion not simply because it’s his…
Jon’s Movie Review: ‘The Big Short’
In The Big Short, writer/director Adam McKay creates a deliberately dizzying visual aesthetic to imitate the rhetoric involved in many of the banks’ business practices. He postulates that their vague language, confusing double dealings and overall disregard for ethics were the…