Onwards and Upwards!
I finished reading film critic and academic Adam Nayman’s auteurist take on the American filmmaker David Fincher, David Fincher: Mind Games, last week. Since the book isn’t that fresh in my mind, I’ll skip a full review and just post a few thoughts I had on it. Overall, Nayman has released a very fine, attractive, …
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I was late to Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, a sequel to one of the best films made by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980). Did the likely best horror movie of all time need a sequel? No, but Stephen King did write the novel The Shining in 1977 and then wrote its sequel Doctor Sleep …
Continue reading ““Doctor Sleep: The Director’s Cut” Will Keep You Awake”
I was late to Edward Norton’s 2019 film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, mainly because the reviews I came across on the film had been critical of how far Norton strayed from Lethem’s source material. I’m happy to report that Norton’s film is ambitious, intelligent, dense, and makes for a fine and …
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I will be pleasantly surprised if I end up liking any new film I see this year as much as I liked Clark Duke’s comic thriller Arkansas. The film, adapted from John Brandon’s novel of the same title, is sad, funny, smart, and very unpredictable. I went into the film knowing very little so I’ll …
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I was late to Kevin MacDonald’s gritty and sad 2014 submarine film Black Sea. The film came out right around the time critics were started to realize that Jude Law might make a fine character actor, now that his peak years of stardom had passed and his hairline had receded. In the film, Law plays …
Last night I watched Shane Black’s buddy comedy The Nice Guys for the first time since I watched it in a Detroit theater in the summer of 2016. The film holds up so nicely (I’ll try to avoid that word as much as I can) that I was half tempted to rewatch it a second …
The name of this blog should really be “I Was Late” because as with most of the works I write about I was late to Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsummer (released last year). Like with Aster’s first film, Hereditary, Midsommar is best experienced with as little known about it as possible. The start of …
Continue reading “In the Sommar Time, I Learned to Die: Midsommar”
Probably one of the most criminally misunderstood comic book movies, Venom is a brilliant B-movie that knows it is a B-movie and isn’t taken very seriously by its creators. Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a San Francisco news reporter who is a bit of a slob, very arrogant, dishonest, disloyal, and has no friends. This …
Continue reading “Revisiting the B-Movie Glory That is Venom”
Mark Wahlberg certainly continues to show love for his hometown of Boston in his filmography. From The Departed through Patriot’s Day to the recent Spenser Confidential (now streaming on Netflix), Wahlberg frequently chooses projects set in his hometown. In Spenser Confidential, Wahlberg plays the title character, a former Boston Police officer about to end a …
Continue reading “Wahlberg is Back in Boston in “Spenser Confidential””
In an attempt to avoid writing a completely negative review (which is against the principles of this blog) of Dee Rees’s The Last Thing He Wanted, I’ll focus on the new film’s strong suits. There is a good cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, our national treasure Willem Dafoe, Rosie Perez, and Toby Jones. …
Aden Thomas Jordan