Film diary

A video essay about how Star Wars was saved in the edit inspired me to finally watch Harmy’s Despecialized Edition, which had been sitting on my hard drive for years. Not having seen the original practical effects in decades, I expected them to look a lot rougher than they did. Their toyetic artifice is definitely apparent, but knowing how much of a leap forward they were in 1977—the industry drafted behind this achievement for well… See more →

Bruce Lee’s electrifying fight scenes may be the primary draw, but Nora Miao’s amazing outfit is a close second. I didn’t expect this to be the case, but Gordon Chan’s loose remake with Jet Li, Fist of Legend, is a superior film in nearly all respects.

Biopics are an almost universally boring and unnecessary category, but I, Tonya subverts that by a) relitigating a scandal and depicting as a hero someone long understood to be a villain, and b) being brutally entertaining. Its pitch-black comedy is reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, with inferior style but a vastly more appealing and sympathetic protagonist. As Tonya Harding and her mother, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney own the film, and without performances… See more →

Call Me by Your Name strikes me as an important achievement, but one that doesn’t speak to me as much as I had hoped, at least not as much as Carol or Moonlight, the other recent queer crossover hits that are inevitably offered for comparison. The gulf between its adolescent protagonist’s cosmopolitan intellectualism and my own experiences as a teen may be a factor, and it doesn’t help that I am definitely not a fan… See more →

A sweet fairy tale, easily the best of the small handful of Guillermo del Toro films I’ve seen. My one gripe is that it relies so heavily on the (strong) appeal of Sally Hawkins’ and Richard Jenkins’ performances that the film sags when they’re not onscreen. Michael Shannon is a serviceable villain, but his contours aren’t nuanced or idiosyncratic enough to justify the amount of attention del Toro lavishes on him.

I liked this so much more the second time!

Much as The Force Awakens strongly echoes A New Hope, many elements of The Empire Strikes Back are recognizable in The Last Jedi:

• A budding Jedi, Rey (née Luke Skywalker), seeks training from a master, Luke Skywalker (née Yoda), isolated on an obscure planet, Ahch-To (née Dagobah).
• Meanwhile, her friends in the Resistance (née Rebellion) are on the run from the First Order (née Empire).
• A rogue named DJ (née Lando Calrissian) comes to their aid… See more →

Greg Sestero’s 2013 memoir, The Disaster Artist, tells the story of his unlikely friendship with Tommy Wiseau, a bizarre and mysterious man more than two decades Sestero’s senior. Both men dream of movie stardom, and the book centers on the making of The Room, Wiseau’s self-financed and uniquely terrible feature film, which later inspired an enduring cult following. Anyone reading the memoir is probably already a fan of The Room, and hoping to gain some… See more →

If I were a congressman running for governor, and my son and my nephew committed an appalling crime together, the first thing I would do is arrange a dinner date to discuss the matter in a public place with my unstable brother.

Like the magic trade itself, this movie is a silly thing that takes itself way too seriously.

When I see a new film of almost universal acclaim, sometimes I go out of my way to read the negative reviews to get a little distance from the zeitgeist. In the case of The Florida Project’s negative reviews, I saw a few patterns:

• the expected backlash against the critical consensus
• the frustration of viewers who prefer more traditional narratives
• locals objecting to the portrayal of Florida
• accusations of poverty porn

One flavor of… See more →

I generally appreciate starry-eyed visionaries following through on ill-advised, shoot-for-the-moon ideas, even when the results are underwhelming. There are lessons to be learned and inspiration to be taken, and some demonstrable good is likely to come of it eventually. That said, I wish Loving Vincent, the first animated feature film to be constructed from tens of thousands of oil paintings, were more of an achievement than a stunt.

Narratively, it’s a fairly stale exercise in… See more →