Category: movies
- You Gotta Start SomewhereBeginners a film by Mike Mills. With Ewen McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Mary Page Keller, Cosmo. I have the perfect solution for those who loved 20th Century Women and don’t know what to watch next (after they’ve read the profile of director Mike Mills in the New Yorker): watch Mills’ previous film Beginners, which streams ...Read more
- Maybe Not This VillageTwentieth Century Women a film by Mike Mills. With Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Lucas Jade Zumann. ****1/2 When I first heard the title of this movie, I thought, what the hell is a twentieth century woman? How is she different from a twenty-first century woman? But now that I’ve seen it, I think the ...Read more
- The Poetry of Everyday SpeechFences a film by Denzel Washington. Screenplay by August Wilson. With Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo. When I was a young man growing up in Pittsburgh, I wanted to be the writer who put the city on the map. I read Theodore Dreiser’s Newspaper Days; he’d spent some time in the city, and ...Read more
- A Star is TornLa La Land a film by Damien Chazelle. With Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Rosemarie DeWitt. ***** I’ve said so many times that a movie is not this that I want to be clear when one is: this is the feel-good movie of the year, 2016, 2017, whatever year you got. From the moment it opens with ...Read more
- Uncle NutcaseManchester by the Sea. A film by Kenneth Longegan. With Casey Affleck, Kyle Chandler, Michelle Williams, Lucas Hedges. ***** Early in Manchester by the Sea, while the credits are rolling, there is a scene that continued to haunt me after the movie was over. Two brothers were out on a commercial fishing boat with the son ...Read more
- Black Boys Looking BlueSouth to a Very Old Place, Stomping the Blues, The Blue Devils of Nada, From the Briarpatch File from Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray. The Library of America. 1049 pp. $45.00. Moonlight, a film by Barry Jenkins, with Mahershala Ali, Duan Sanderson, Naomie Harris. ***** I haven’t finished the last few pieces from Collected Essays ...Read more
- That Ain’t FunnyThe Hollars, a film by John Krasinski and James Strouse. With Margo Martindale, Sharlto Copley, Richard Jenkins, Anna Kendrick. * The phrase I use for my title is one my son often repeated when he was four and five years old. We had just moved to a working class Durham neighborhood that abutted a textile mill, ...Read more
- Glug GlugSully, a film by Clint Eastwood. With Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney. I’ve always thought of Clint Eastwood as the King of the Grade B movie. One sure sign of Grade B is prolonged footage of a car driving somewhere, and there was ample such footage in Play Misty for Me, the first movie he ...Read more
- Banks Robbing MenHell or High Water, a film by David MacKenzie, written by Taylor Sheridan. With Jeff Bridges, Gil Birmingham, Chris Pine, Ben Foster. ***** Sometimes people take a genre movie, which has elements that many movies have, and take it to a whole new level. Sometimes that movie is overlooked for that very reason. Hell or High ...Read more
- Equal Rights to Live in HellEquity a film by Meena Menon and Amy Fox. With Anna Gunn, James Purefoy, Sarah Megan Thomas, Alysia Reiner.****1/2 This is the best movie about Wall Street I’ve ever seen. It’s probably the first one I ever understood. That doesn’t have to do with the fact that it’s about women. It has to do with expert ...Read more
- Get Your Buns Over HereSausage Party, a film by Gret Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. With Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. *** What a cast, right? Five Oscar nominees in one movie. Unfortunately, it’s an animated film about food products in the supermarket. The voices are great. But the cast doesn’t show its stuff. Apparently this ...Read more
- The Roaring FiftiesIndignation, a film by James Schamus. With Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond. Reviewed by David Guy. ****1/2 Indignation is a remarkable movie that completely stunned me and that I can’t recommend too highly. The problem is that it’s taken from a Philip Roth novel—even the title sounds rather Philip Roth—and as I describe ...Read more
- Captain FascisticCaptain Fantastic, a film by Matt Ross. With Viggo Mortensen, George MacKay, Frank Langella, Ann Dowd. ***1/2 The father figure in Captain Fantastic, a man named Ben (Viggo Mortensen), reminds me of a teacher and coach I had in secondary school. He was an extremely difficult but fair teacher, who got the most out of us ...Read more
- Angry Men and Wild Women12 Angry Men a film by Sydney Lumet. With Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam. ***** Ghostbusters a film by Paul Feig. With Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones. **** Last spring my wife and I saw By Sydney Lumet at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and set about watching the work of ...Read more
- Two in the BushHunt for the Wilderpeople a film by Taika Waititi. With Sam Neill, Julian Dennison, Rima Te Wiata Why should we watch yet another movie about a grouchy old white guy who takes up with a minority youth and teaches him how to survive in a difficult world? For one thing, the old white guy is Sam ...Read more
- He’s the Best Friend I’ve Ever Had. He Does Fart a Lot. He’s Also Dead.Swiss Army Man. A film by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. With Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe. People say this about movies all the time, but in this case I feel fully confident: you’ve never seen anything like Swiss Army Man. Hank (Paul Dano) has somehow gotten stranded on the proverbial desert island. He has all the ...Read more
- Mommy and I Are So Damn BrilliantThe Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. New Directions. 484 pp. $18.95 I can’t remember when I’ve had such mixed feelings about a novel. There is an assumption behind this book that people with higher IQ’s, or people who have more knowledge, are superior individuals, who don’t have to deal with the rest of us. There is ...Read more
- The Story We NeedFree State of Jones a film by Gary Ross. With Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali There are major disputes about what actually happened in the events that make up Free State of Jones, but any story is just a story—it’s not reality—and we seem to get the stories we want, or that we need. This ...Read more
- No But I Saw the BookBrooklyn a novel by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 262 pp. $15.00 Even I, a person who loves reading above all other pleasures, who believes the novel is the Great Bright Book of Life, was thinking I didn’t need to go back and read Brooklyn because I’d seen the movie. I loved it, figured the book couldn’t add ...Read more
- In a PickleMaggie’s Plan a film by Rebecca Miller. With Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore. **** The first thing to be said about Maggie’s Plan is that it is a comedy. I don’t care what Rebecca Miller has done in the past and I don’t care how serious the conversation seems at the beginning of the movie. ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)