Life is, if nothing else, a continuous learning experience. That old adage of picking up new information every day might be trite, but it's also extremely accurate. For example, I just found out today that I've been doing the title of this column wrong for all these years. I'm supposed to capitalize "Is" because despite … Continue reading This Film Is Not Yet Watchable – March 2025
You may be wondering why this month's column is coming out so late, nine whole days into January. Well, there are three reasons. The first is that, right after Christmas, I got a stye in my left eye. Despite multiple attempts to pop and/or drain it, the thing got so big that my eye was … Continue reading This Film is Not Yet Watchable – January 2025
Steven Soderbergh's newest tech thriller, KIMI, raises one of the more interesting questions I've had to ask in recent cinema. Namely, how unlikable can you make your ostensible protagonist before the viewers start rooting for the bad guys to win? Because, wow, just wow did I hate this lead character, so much so that an … Continue reading Manic Pixie Stream Girl – KIMI
The heist movie is a subgenre that's basically out of gas at this point, at least from a plot perspective. Pretty much every film follows a fairly standard pattern of a big idea, complications that could be easily foreseen with a bit of logical thinking, at least two betrayals, and an ultimate victor when it … Continue reading Stacking the Deck – No Sudden Move
Last year was a tremendous boon for Netflix when it came to the Oscar stage. The success of Roma (as well as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to a lesser extent, not to mention a slew of documentaries over the years), followed by the Academy's rebuke of traditionalists like Steven Spielberg emboldened the world's premiere streaming … Continue reading DownStream – Netflix and Shill, Part 1
I Actually Paid To See This 