Screen
‘The Messenger’ digs into a different side of the Army
America is an interesting country. Full of contradictions, hopes, failures and, every now and then, surprises. The nation is complex, to say the very least. Perhaps one of the clearest representations of these complexities is the war in Iraq...
Learning the wrong lessons
An employee of the Chicago public school system, ha-cha seventh-grade educator Elizabeth, portrayed by Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher, blows most of her classroom time showing her students (whose names she never learns) movies such as Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver and...
War, hot and cold, in ‘Underground’
Not every movie survives the baptism of time. Even award winners and those end-of-the-year Top Ten movies become buried under years of obsolescence. Which...
Sexually transmitted ignorance
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is an alarmingly well-reviewed throwback horror movie that follows Jay Height (Maika Monroe), whose vagina gets cursed by Satan after she does it with her boyfriend. He straps her to a chair and explains she’s got ...
Alone, together
The Koreans call it holojok—a portmanteau of holo (alone) and jok (together)—a growing phenomenon of young adults choosing to live alone in single-family homes. By some estimates, one-third of...
When I paint my masterpiece
Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke, in one of his best performances) is having a crisis of faith. The parish pastor of New York’s 250-year-old First...
Three’s a charm
If Toy Story 3 had sprung, Slinky Doglike, from any creative think tank besides Pixar Animation Studios, it might be considered a classic. As is, it’s a good sequel to the 1999 Toy Story 2 and the 1995 original. After a rather shrill and conventional first half, ...
The space between
Ad Astra, the latest from filmmaker par excellence James Gray, opens with a shot of the cosmos, vast and terrifying. As the camera pans...
Crass and fun
It`s not good to start a review by saying that the film wasn’t anywhere near as bad or as stupid as I was afraid it’d be, but that’s exactly how I felt about the inane satire MacGruber. Crude and sophomoric, it still had lots of laughs and a surprisingly polished ...
This is us
What is the story of us? That’s a question many movies try to answer, sometimes with the “us” meaning you and me, sometimes with...