All the Money in the World (2017)
As a representation of the corrupting influence of money – whether in the hands of mafioso or oil barons – All the Money in the World is successful if simplistic.
The Ordinary Heroism of Only the Brave
Only the Brave does the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots justice by judiciously downplaying their greatness.
Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)
The Last Knight is a gloriously stupid, aggressively excessive cavalcade of explosions and robots and exploding robots.
Deepwater Horizon (2016)
Deepwater Horizon feels deeply authentic, building remarkable tension until disaster inevitably strikes.
Entourage (2015)
Maybe I’m not the audience for Entourage. I’ve seen very little of the show – snippets here and there of the later seasons that my wife forced herself to sit through, presumably out of completist compulsion. So I had no sense of good will towards movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier), his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy…
Shifting Gears: How the Rise of the Fast and the Furious Franchise Represents the Changing Landscape of Modern Blockbusters
Looking back at The Fast and the Furious (in case you’re puzzled by the title, that’s the first one, made in 2001) from 2015, the film looks a lot like a stepping stone. An unassuming genre picture that shared more than a bit in common with the preceding year’s Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, its…
The Gambler (2014)
The Gambler has earned its fair share of criticism for being yet another film about the problems of a rich white dude. That’s more of an observation than a criticism, since the film is interrogating the idea of how one can deliberately erode this privilege. A fairer remark would be to note that, unfortunately, The…
Lone Survivor (2013)
Lone Survivor desperately wants to be described with clichéd buzzwords like “authentic,” “gritty” and “visceral,” but never earns such descriptors. When its four bearded Navy SEALs find themselves outnumbered by hundreds of Taliban guerrilla fighters, the action sequences’ painful physicality (there’s some bone-crunching stuntwork on display) is squandered by poor directorial choices from Peter Berg.…
