Whenever someone asks me what my favorite movie is, I get a little bit embarrassed. “It’s called That Thing You Do! It’s a comedy from 1996,” I say. “Oh. So it’s really funny?” “Yes. Well… I mean… I personally think so. It’s not really a punchline type comedy.” “So it’s more, like, surreal? Physical comedy,…
I would love to appear reasonable about a Christopher Nolan movie. Nolan discussions so easily sink into Scalding-Hot Takes (especially when his fanboys do things like ‘make Interstellar the #12 (!) movie of all-time on IMDB’), and having a strong opinion on him can look like either blindly following the silly sheep or curmudgeonly marginalizing someone just…
“Having dreams is what makes life tolerable.” Rudy is an excellent underdog movie, doing almost everything right and almost nothing wrong. On a technical level, as the sum of its parts, it’s very good, borderline great. It’s also one of my favorite movies in the entire world. It has X-factor magic in spades, it’s genuinely…
When I saw The Shawshank Redemption in high school, it was one of the movies (along with, believe it or not, The 40 Year Old Virgin) that convinced me that movies could tell stories on a more profound level than simple entertainment. Shawshank has a little bit of a strange backstory. It was a pretty…
(Article contains spoilers.) It’s been so long since a movie in theaters has looked worthy of your afternoon and $9 that Gone Girl should be a thirst-quencher. After a disastrous summer that left audiences covering their eyes, the mere promise of a watchable film is enough to drag you out the door to a 10:00 AM…
This is an entry in the Pokemon Movies Retrospective Movie #8: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew “I won’t be dying. I’ll be going back to Sir Aaron’s side.” – Lucario (Japanese dub) As of this review, we’ve reached the half-way point of the Pokemon movies! Yay! This time we’ll be looking at the 8th movie, Lucario…
This is an entry in the Pokemon Movies Retrospective Movie #5: Pokemon Heroes – Latios & Latias “If the Soul Dew should be used for evil, its power will be tainted, and the Soul Dew will disappear along with the island.” – Legend of the Soul Dew (Japanese Dub) Pokemon Heroes – Latios & Latias, 「水の都の護神 ラティアスとラティオス」(lit.…
Have you seen The Usual Suspects? No? Then STOP READING THIS, queue it up on Netflix — assuming it’s still streaming… I feel like half the time I want to watch something there, it’s been taken down since I last checked — and avoid all other discussion of the movie. So much of it is…
The Wolf of Wall Street, I can already tell, is never going to get its proper discussion. Whenever someone says anything bad about the movie, it’ll concern its vulgarity, its garishness, maybe its running time—not the actual content of it. And that’s a shame, because Wolf—based on a memoir from Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who…
The Way Way Back (2013) – 3½ stars (out of 4) The Kings of Summer (2013) – 3 stars (out of 4) I watched two coming-of-age-themed movies this weekend that had enough interesting compare-and-contrast elements between them that I decided I wanted to write a quick article here reviewing them.