“Rocky Mountain Express”: Crossing Canada at Science Museum of Minnesota’s...
Few large-format films are as lyrical as Rocky Mountain Express. Writer/director Stephen Low goes light on the didactics and lets his audience lose themselves in the romance of the rails. These...
View ArticleKenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” Is Everything You’d Hope,...
After a preview screening of Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, the studio asked me to write a concise reaction on a card. I wrote something along the lines of, “A grandly old-fashioned...
View Article“The Disaster Artist” Tells the Story of “The Room”
Is it possible to make a good movie about a bad one? How about if you’re James Franco? The answer to both questions, it seems, is yes. With The Disaster Artist, Franco succeeds in telling a...
View Article“The Shape of Water”: A Love Story Sans Towel
The first half of The Shape of Water is a marvel of quiet visual storytelling. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) works on the cleaning staff of a mysterious midcentury lab in Baltimore. Vast corridors lead to...
View Article“The Phantom Thread” is “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Except Literally
Daniel Day-Lewis attended this year’s Golden Globes with a shaved head, looking uncannily like Matt Lauer. Every time the camera cut to him, he’d be smiling gently and for a moment, before the correct...
View Article“Annihilation” Tastes a Rainbow of Gruesome Death
Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation is, as the New Yorker describes, a paradigm of “weird fiction.” The first volume of his Southern Reach trilogy, all published in 2014, the book doesn’t develop...
View Article“Dream Big”: Engineering Inspires at Science Museum of Minnesota Omnitheater
Thinking back to my ’80s childhood, I’m not quite sure what I expected to be doing when I got to be my dad’s age. As a white middle-class Catholic kid in Duluth, Minnesota, I was told I could grow up...
View Article“A Wrinkle In Time” Is the Book Adaptation It Was Worth Waiting Half a...
Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer has been hailed as “the King of Weird Fiction.” The Queen Mother, surely, must be Madeleine L’Engle, who’s been keeping young adult fiction trippy since the Kennedy...
View Article“Flower” Takes the Bloom Off Zoey Deutsch
I was less than shocked, when the credits rolled for Flower, to see a bunch of men’s names flash by. Why? Well, let’s talk about this movie. Zoey Deutch, insanely charismatic and adorable, plays Erica,...
View ArticleSteven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” Needs a Hard Reset
It’s easy to understand what attracted Steven Spielberg to Ready Player One: it’s a story about a media mogul who captivates billions with a souped-up reinvention of the pop culture of his youth. The...
View Article“Ocean’s 8” is Good Old-Fashioned Fun with Larceny
This caper is a breeze. By way of contrast, a cosmic hellgate opened for the transfer of power between the genders in Ghostbusters. The Force Awakens summoned John Williams’s orchestral pomp for the...
View Article“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” Needs Way, Way, Way, Way, Way More Jeff...
Everyone loves the part in Jurassic Park where the Tyrannosaurus roars while the WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH banner flaps down to the ground. The Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom filmmakers seem to...
View Article“Eighth Grade” Celebrates the Small Victories That Add Up
The deeper we fall into the moral abyss of the Trump era, the more audiences are drawn to celebrations of simple kindness and unassuming empathy. Suddenly Mister Rogers, never less than admirable, is a...
View ArticleMovie Review: “The Predator”: This Dog Don’t Hunt
Thought experiment: what if Shane Black had directed Annihilation, and 20th Century Fox tapped Alex Garland to direct The Predator? The latter film would have haunting intervals where its dudes with...
View ArticleMovie Review: “Lizzie” Reimagines the Borden Story as a Parable of Patriarchy
If Lizzie feels particularly poignant in the wake of the 2016 election, it’s not because it’s newly relevant: it’s because it feels freshly futile. A two-hour dramatization of flagrant disdain for...
View ArticleMovie Review: Neil Armstrong Biopic “First Man” Is a Stunning and Strange...
Before the Twin Cities preview screening of First Man, a University of Minnesota professor was invited to speak for a few minutes. NASA, he pointed out, still exists. “They make monthly videos...
View ArticleMovie Review: “The Hate U Give” is an American Tragedy with an Empowering...
After seeing The Hate U Give, I tried to think back on what movies I saw as a (white, middle-class, Midwestern) teenager that might have taught me about racism. The best I could come up with were...
View Article“Halloween” Sequel and “The Fog” Restoration Give John Carpenter a Buzzworthy...
In exploiting the serial-killer genre, as horror historian Grady Hendrix has put it, shockmeisters took advantage of the fact that “the scariest motive is no motive at all.” You can’t appease a killer...
View ArticleMovie Review: It’s Hard Out Here for “The Favourite”
The trailer makes The Favourite look like a darkly funny romp about two cousins competing for the affection of Britain’s Queen Anne. That it is, but then it hangs around for a while, like a court...
View ArticleA “Captain Marvel” Review Written By Someone Who’s Completely Lost Track of...
Okay, I haven’t completely lost track. I’ve seen, let’s say, ten movies, including the pathbreaking Best Picture nominee Black Panther. I’ve also seen the first two Avengers, but you can hardly fault...
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