Everybody I know seems to have a Christmas favorite that they watch every holiday season, with family or without. For some, nothing says Christmas like It’s a Wonderful Life (which I recently re-watched for the first time since I was a kid; I liked it, but it struck me that about 65% of the screenplay…
On December 19th, 2001—that is to say, exactly fifteen years ago from the day after this article’s publication—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring started playing in cinemas around the world. I was nine… and a bit. Despite its PG-13 rating for “Intense battle sequence and some scary images,” I did see…
At the Academy Awards in 2012, there was a little video montage in which an interviewer asked a bunch of Hollywood celebrities the same question: “What makes a great film?” A variety of answers ranging from dull to insightful spouted forth, but the best by far came from Robert Downey Jr., who said, “I think…
As you may have noticed, 2016 has been an awful year for movies. We find ourselves now in December, and while I’ve seen quite a few movies that I’ve liked, up until a few days ago I didn’t love any of them. It doesn’t usually take eleven months to make me love a movie. Still,…
Ever since the unprecedented box office success of the first Avengers film, studios have been jumping on the “extended universe” bandwagon left and right. That’s why we have an awful Justice League series, and why we will soon be treated with King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Universal Monsters series in the Avengers style. Even Godzilla…
This past summer I watched all four Lethal Weapon movies in as many days and I learned a lot—about myself, about movies, about hair in the 80s, about life in general—but possibly the most important thing I learned, something that most of us have forgotten since about 2004, is how immensely likable Mel Gibson used…
Green Room (2015) The Plot: After playing a last-minute gig at a sketchy club in Middle of Nowhere Oregon, a punk band finds themselves in a difficult situation when the lead singer, Pat (Anton Yelchin), accidentally witnesses a murder. Now trapped in the club with a gang of skinheads—led by the calmly unsettling Darcy (Patrick…
