Even though the Academy Award’s history of choosing abominable Best Picture winners dates back to this venerable institution’s inception, my first memory of living through a truly confounding upset belongs to Crash beating Brokeback Mountain. A few years later, when The King‘s Speech somehow took the prize from The Social Network, I vowed never to care about the Oscars again.
Will Ferrell’s You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush is my favorite Broadway production that I never actually experienced in person.
Continue reading “Will and George, Alec and Donald, Jim and Andy…and Tony”
Tee Grizzley & Lil Durk’s Bloodas lacks a singular identity.
Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying is the type of film that I fear people will walk away from asking, “So what?”
Continue reading “A Primer: LAST FLAG FLYING (Richard Linklater)”
Magic’s having a theatrical moment.
Continue reading “AT THE ILLUSIONIST’S TABLE (The McKittrick Hotel): Dinner Magic”
Much like the rest of their albums, Songs of Experience features U2 doing U2 things.
Thelma, Norway’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, falls prey to a common pitfall of the horror and sci-fi genres: it withholds basic information to drum up artificial suspense.
Potentially my hottest take of 2017: Laura Poitras’ Academy Award-winning Citzenfour from 2014 is worse than Risk, her follow-up released earlier this year.
The Breadwinner is the rare sort of animated movie whose story could feasibly translate to the realm of live action.
Even the worst documentaries tend to be able to maintain an audience’s attention because most chronicle interesting stories; why would someone go through the trouble of making one about a boring subject (this generalization of course precludes navel-gazing personal autobiographies). As such, when evaluating them, I try to focus more on the strength of the storytelling instead of the strength of the story.
Continue reading “2017 Rewind: ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL (Steve James)”
Write All Nite 