Category Archives: Movies

Review: Upgrade

Posted on October 14, 2019 by philipbrasor

Leigh Whannell’s seeming homage to David Cronenberg pits an analog holdover named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), who likes to listen to blues music on vinyl and rebuild classic cars, against the already arrived cyborg technology that rules the rest of his … Continue reading →

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Review: Crawl

Posted on October 12, 2019 by philipbrasor

Damsel-in-distress movies still exist, but these days women in peril tend to be the heroes who defeat malevolent forces rather than their victims; though in many cases the deadly force is not malevolent, but merely hungry. In this vein, the … Continue reading →

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Review: Yesterday

Posted on October 11, 2019 by philipbrasor

The most interesting thing about this pop star fantasy is that the Beatles estate agreed to license so many songs. McCartney I can understand, since he was always the band’s most fervent champion regardless of how his beloved “tunes” were … Continue reading →

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Review: Joker

Posted on October 2, 2019 by philipbrasor

Todd Phillips’ odd superhero gloss has a lot of distractions built into it, the most obvious one being its non-relationship to the Batman franchise (or franchises, depending on how doctrinnaire you are) as a feature that is only tangentially relevant … Continue reading →

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Review: Hellboy

Posted on September 27, 2019 by philipbrasor

It says a lot about this reboot that its focus on an origin story that seems quite different from the one put forward in the previous movies is barely coherent; or that it mostly does away with whatever it was … Continue reading →

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Review: Eighth Grade

Posted on September 22, 2019 by philipbrasor

There are few segments in movies of recent memory that so starkly delineate the gulf between the director’s sensibility and that of their protagonist as the one that opens Eighth Grade. I don’t know how old Bo Burnham is, but … Continue reading →

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Review: Ad Astra

Posted on September 21, 2019 by philipbrasor

The points of narrative and thematic convergence between James Gray’s last film, the old-school world explorer epic, The Lost City of Z, and his latest film, the old-school sci-fi potboiler, Ad Astra, are too numerous to ignore, but the main … Continue reading →

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Review: A Private War

Posted on September 13, 2019 by philipbrasor

The person played by Rosamund Pike in this harrowing biopic is supposed to be American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in 2012 covering the civil war in Syria. However, early on there’s a sense that Matthew Heineman’s film intends … Continue reading →

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Review: Free Solo

Posted on September 8, 2019 by philipbrasor

Though Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s and Jimmy Chin’s Oscar-winning documentary is ostensibly about world-famous rock climber Alex Honnold, it’s really about how we define heroes nowadays, especially in the context of movies. Honnold in many ways embodies the classic traits of … Continue reading →

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Review: Ash Is Purest White

Posted on September 7, 2019 by philipbrasor

Though it’s tempting to call his latest film a return to form, Jia Zhangke’s output since his last critically acknowledged masterpiece, Still Life (2006), mainly shows an artist grappling with his place in his own world, meaning China. For the … Continue reading →

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