This movie prompted me to catch up with five related movies, all of which I strongly recommend, by way of historic and cinematographic context: No Other Land (Oscar-nominated [now Oscar-winning!] doc about settlement abuses).…

“I thought it looked normal from the outside.” First: Huge props to Anna Kendrick for taking the helm here in addition to acting. Strong cast: check. Solid cinematography: check. Period details: check. Kendrick (in her debut as a director) is attempting some ambitious story-telling: shuffled chronology and a mash-up of at least three quite different genres: (i) aspiring-young-female-actress-struggling-to-catch-a-break-in-sexist-seventies-Hollywood, (ii) true-life-period-crime-story, and (ii) portrait-of-ruthless-psychokiller-cipher. And it (somewhat miraculously) juggles and blends these disparate themes quite effectively. Warning: For this viewer (all…

Thirty-one years post release, this one—believe it or not!—is actually pretty amusing. Possessing that great gift of not taking itself too seriously, it’s a Western that plays like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. With a campy, light-on-its-feet script by John Wayne. Clearly cashing…

Alas, this is no Grand Budapest, but you can’t blame Wes Anderson. The maestro of meta, the burgermeister of bric-a-brac, the Boss Tweed of twee is gunna do what he gunna do. 

This time out, after a too-showy, increasingly obligatory, proscenium-exposing, aspect-ratio-flaunting story-within-a-story kaleidoscopic setup, you’re delivered by train to Anderson’s latest mise en scène: a bleached out 1950s Americana Southwest with mushroom-cloud-dappled skies and a potpourri of quirky characters (aka his troop of regular players, spiced with newbies Margot Robbie,…

Pairs with fictional flawed Titans in Tar, The Master, and Strangelove. Money quote: “You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important.” Things I liked:

Christopher Nolan’s boldness to trust that we’ll track with him as he parallelizes and jump-cuts between key turning-points across time periods.

Nolan’s utter confidence to explode all of the audience’s anticipation by culminating with the Trinity detonation to end Act II—only to drop his even bigger bomb in Act III with the revelation of Lewis Strauss as…