Tag: movie reviews

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One of the pleasures of live theater and opera is that you come to a deeper appreciation of an artwork by seeing it performed and produced in different ways by different people. The work’s identity shines out more clearly through all the changes.

This pleasure is usually denied to moviegoers. Reboots and ripoffs are increasingly common these days, because the entertainment industry seems committed to cranking out products without nurturing talent and creativity. But genuine remakes are rare. And it is rarer still for a director to remake one of his own films. (more…)

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Tom Cruise and Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest movie, Digger, was initially presented as a morality tale about old white men wrecking the world through climate change. After hearing of a twist in the movie and seeing some positive reviews from unexpected sources, I concluded this must just be the surface-level presentation, with the real target being the smug, Don’t Look Up-style sermonising of Hollywood itself. If anyone might hit back against Hollywood liberal groupthink, it would be Tom Cruise, right? (more…)

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Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as James Bond, turns 20 in November. Casino Royale was stylishly directed by New Zealander Martin Campbell, who also helmed another excellent Bond reboot, 1995’s Goldeneye, the first and best of the Pierce Brosnan films.

Casino Royale rapidly became one of my favorite Bond films, and although I have always claimed that Sean Connery is James Bond, my revealed preferences over the past two decades have been rather different. I find myself returning again and again to Casino Royale and Craig’s other Bond films. (more…)

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A fan asked me to discuss Michael Mann’s 1995 movie Heat as part of my ongoing series of essays on mafia movies. I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that Heat is not really a mafia movie. The good news is that Heat is such a magnificent movie that I am reviewing it anyway.

Heat is a crime movie, indeed an organized crime movie. But it is not a mafia movie, although the trailers and posters make it look like one, because it stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, both of whom have had leading roles in major mafia movies. But the criminals in Heat do not belong to Italian, Irish, or Jewish organized crime “families.” (more…)

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“Your homeland will give you strength and wisdom”—Sibiriada (1979)

I feel somebody more qualified than me should have written this review; I consider myself wholly inadequate to the task. But I remember very well the first time I watched Sibiriada, back in the day when I was—as a side quest to biographical research I was conducting at the time—tackling some Soviet-era Russian films (and learning a smattering of Russian). (more…)

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Sergio Leone’s final film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) is often touted as one of the all-time great mafia movies. I beg to differ. I think Leone’s Westerns are masterpieces. But Once Upon a Time in America is a terrible movie: boring, distasteful, and dumb.

However, I let myself be persuaded to rewatch it, on the grounds that there are multiple versions of the film, and surely the film I hated was the massively cut and rearranged American version that Leone had disowned. If only I would watch the 3 hour, 49-minute version shown to thunderous applause in Europe, then I would appreciate that this too is a masterpiece. (more…)

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The great lie is that we live in an “Open Society.” We are in the most heavily propagandized culture in human history, where every major institution, public or private, remains trapped in egalitarian orthodoxy. Every man is his own commissar and is eager to police both himself and his neighbor. All myths must be deconstructed; all culture homogenized into gray slop. We’re so embedded into this system that we can’t even recognize it; it must be pointed out to us from outside. Thus, it took a Chinese reporter to ask Odyssey director Christopher Nolan the obvious question of whether he is a bard for a civilization at dusk. Nolan essentially agreed that he is, arguing that one must apologize for greatness to remain true to democratic values. He’s obviously right. (more…)

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1930’s Just Imagine is a movie that I feel like I should have heard of before now. Not that it’s the greatest movie in the world or even a good movie, but it’s very odd and unusual, and it’s rating on Trav’s Time Capsule Meter™ is off the charts.

I first found this movie on Tubi under the category of Musicals. Looking at the description I see the release date of 1930. Cool. It’s a pre-code. Then I see it is a science fiction movie and now I’m really intrigued. Americans were slow to embrace sci-fi. It was primarily a European thing through the silent film era. So good or bad, Just Imagine is notable for being one of the first American sci-fi movies. (more…)

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Backrooms is a 2026 horror film directed by Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old director and composer from Petaluma, California. Parsons’ directorial debut traces its lineage directly to his web series of the same name. It is thought provoking, minimal, inverted, frantic, and disturbing. The backrooms are a surreal extra-dimensional realm of transitional, liminal spaces that are familiar yet distorted, eerie, and terrifying. Visualize disused office spaces, malls, pools, and derelict ghost-like cityscapes in a limbo-realm of cubicle hell. (more…)

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Obsession is one of the most successful films of all time. Made in under a month with a budget of under $750,000, it is closing in on $460 million worldwide even though it just opened in China. Director Curry Baker, just 26 years old, has already been offered $10 million for his next film without the studio asking what it is, and star Inde Navarrette has real potential to transcend the “scream queen” niche.

Yet Obsession succeeds because it captures something even its creators don’t fully understand. (more…)

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I went to see the new Minions movie and walked out after around fifteen or twenty minutes. Here’s why.

Minions & Monsters starts with kids at a film history museum where they see a statue of—who else?—the Minions. Seeing that they are curious about these yellow overalled creatures, the guide tells them the story of the Minions. The long story naturally begins in prehistory. The running joke is basically that the Minions, in their innocent zeal to serve evil, must find a villain to glom onto. And when they do, they inadvertently kill him. It’s funny. This is why people like the Minions. (more…)

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In 1921, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello watched the premier of his latest play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the play, half-a dozen fictional characters invade a theater rehearsal, insisting that their story deserves to be told. It was a hit, and became something of a cult later in the century when the post-modernists got hold of it and started clucking about the autonomy of the text and what have you. It was, quite simply, a good idea of Pirandello’s. He knew an author (in his case, a playwright) must have characters, and so seeks them out for his fictions. But what if the situation were reversed? (more…)

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There comes a point in any historical cycle when subversion becomes the mainstream. America reached it long ago. The 250th anniversary came and went with few of the Great and the Good taking notice. What real Americans remain honored their country in small towns throughout the continent. In the cities, sullen and resentful UnitedStatesians hosted commemorations limited to bitter griping about racism, slavery, the genocide of Indians, and the injustice of immigration restrictions. President Donald Trump’s dream of a triumphant celebration was marred by the hostility of the urban centers, the contempt of the press, and the upper class of the nation itself, disillusionment over the Iran War and the resulting inflation, and the general inability of the current government to host a major event. The government couldn’t even put on a parade; the only patriotic group that marched in the capital on the Fourth was Patriot Front. (more…)