What fun! My actual first Wes Anderson film. I enjoyed it; strangely, it didn’t really leave me with an appetite for another. I feel like the construction and execution of this were so well-suited to his vision and preoccupations that there doesn’t seem much left to say.
While I think this film benefits tremendously from being a quirky, experimental anthology, that also subjects it to the same risks as doing multiple plates in a cooking competition. It’s all fun and…
Walk with me.
There are going to be people who are going to tell you, and they’re going to believe it, that BLACK BAG is a spy thriller. They’re going to judge it on these merits, and some of them will find it wanting. You mustn’t blame them for that. They were lied to.
Or at the very least, they weren’t completely trusted.
The cleverest piece of deception in BLACK BAG is nowhere in the plot at all—of which, truly,…
I love sports movies for two reasons:
1. I have a beating heart and soul, and
2. I love to think about the fact that for human beings, everything is *about* something.
THE MIGHTY DUCKS isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema. It's not especially subtle, or nuanced, or elegant and restrained in the ways it balances the spoken and unspoken needs and wants and truths of its child heroes and their adult protagonist (played with weirdly stone-faced, deadpan resignation-turned-hesitant-desire by…
Despite living in a world where ROCKY has irrevocably suffused the fabric of every single piece of media that has come after it, if you haven’t seen ROCKY, there’s a real chance you don’t know what ROCKY is about. I actually think the film is benefitted tremendously by that, so I’m going to keep most of my meditations on it to myself here and just say that I spent much of this 119 minute runtime forgetting I was supposed to…
