Armond White
A
rmond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first infantilizes its audience, then banalizes it, and, finally, controls it through marketing. This commercial strategy, geared toward adolescents of all ages, resembles the Democratic party’s political manipulation of black Americans, targeting that audience ... -
A Better-Than Black List
Ruling film culture starts with controlling film history, so last week the New York Times announced, “Our chief critics have chosen essential movies from the 20th century that convey the larger history of black Americans in cinema.” The selection of 28 ... -
In Hostiles, Hollywood Hates America, Again
American movies today are in a worse state than ever ,to judge by the recent Academy Award nominations — the sorriest list of honorees I’ve ever seen in a 90-year-old process that has, for at least the past dozen years, ... -
Hollywood Plays the #MeToo Game
Every actor on promotional duty bleats the same dull line on their latest movie or TV product: “The writing was so good.” Aaron Sorkin has become the patron saint of this hucksterism. His talking-while-walking specialty (from TV’s West Wing ... -
Phantom Thread and Downsizing: American Decadence, at Home and Abroad
The cynical view of human behavior shared by two new movies, Phantom Thread and Downsizing, was to be expected. They represent the culmination of a cultural change that began as the 1980s indie film movement shifted control of American film ... -
Fishy Political Fantasies
The Star Wars movies belong in the same category as Elvis Presley movies: They’re popular yet are all but unwatchable — except that the Presley pictures evince a human touch. The new, machine-tooled The Last Jedi is sufficiently busy (action ... -
Morrissey: When Demagoguery Goes Pop
While Bruce Springsteen delivers his populist harangue on Broadway, Morrissey brought political complexity to his concert at Madison Square Garden last weekend. This contrast points up a change in pop music’s ongoing political discourse, which seems to have stalled, ... -
Mudbound: Folklore versus Phony-lore
‘Hey, honey, let’s go see that movie called ‘Mudbound,’” said nobody ever. Following a predictably lauded premiere at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, where indie films that take trendy social positions receive sanction, this 1940s-set drama about the ... -
Charles Burnett Honored for Black Misery
Filmmaker Charles Burnett was awarded a career-achievement Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this past weekend. Who’s Burnett? That fair question is part of the Oscars’ ongoing problem, but it’s also part of film ... -
The Politics of Movie Shills
A few years back, as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, I hosted a criticism panel at Columbia University and was bemused when one participant from a national weekly entertainment magazine, insisted that his “reviews are not political!” ... -
Radicalizing Youth via the Movies
Our youth are fair game in the culture wars. The bright-faced young actors portraying 1990s AIDS activists in the new French film BPM (Beats Per Minute) have one particular thing in common with the nubile actresses in the new 1960s-set ... -
The Meyerowitz Stories : A Perfect Weinstein Analogy
Hollywood movies are made by some of the worst people in the world, a fact that all parties in the Harvey Weinstein scandal have now made clear. To understand who they are and the banality of their disreputable behavior, look ... -
Blade Runner 2049 : The Politics of Hollywood Hacks
The highly stylized 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner was probably an influence on 2046, Wong Kar-wai’s wondrous, poetic art-movie investigation into a science-fiction writer’s romantic history with several women. Now it appears that 2046 has, in turn, influenced the reboot of ... -
Battle of the Sexes and Victoria & Abdul: Crowd Pleasing and Crowd Punishing
Battle of the Sexes is unconcerned with equity in life, sports, or art. This overlong, half-comic rewriting of the history of the 1973 tennis stunt between Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) and Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) is so heavily slanted toward ... -
It’s Fake Americana Is Formulaic and Degrading
A favorite David Mamet line obliterates the “sure-fire” entertainment offered by the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s It. In the 2000 movie State and Main, the always edgy-yet-conservative dramatist-polemicist has a character describe her small town’s habits: “Everyone ... -
Crown Heights Is a Docu-Fantasy
Critics used to dismiss socially conscious movies as well-meaning but unartistic (as when deriding director Stanley Kramer’s entire career for his concern with outdated issues such as brotherhood and interracial marriage). Yet social-justice movies now win automatic praise. Crown ... -
Class Consciousness, French- and American-Style
Class confusion is always with us. Our social circumstances are in conflict with our ambitions and desires, and we are often in political denial. This American phenomenon resembles the new decadent cuisine that piles layers of proteins — and then tops ... -
Kathryn Bigelow Does the Wrong Thing in Detroit
‘God save us from white liberals,” a black TV news anchor told me as we exited a press screening of Cry Freedom, the 1987 biopic about the late South African activist Stephen Biko. I repeated that lament to myself while watching ... -
Dunkirk’s War vs. Valerian’s Peace
Winston Churchill’s 1940 “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech is paraphrased in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but after watching nearly two hours of uninspiring mayhem, it rings hollow. Although this is only Nolan’s third movie that is set, ... -
Join the Spider-Man Resistance
The Marvel reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming is such a blatantly calculated example of pop-culture inoculation — it presents a teenage Peter Parker’s apprenticeship to the Avengers clan of superhero misfits — that, maybe, it warrants the same wariness as the vaccination controversy. ... -
In the Almost-Great Baby Driver, Hollywood Goes Asperger’s
Lots of movies are manipulative, but Edgar Wright’s action-comedy Baby Driver defines the era by pampering its teenage audience. Yet its most impressive moment invokes an obscure but cinematic icon: The hero nicknamed Baby (Ansel Elgort), an orphaned hipster ... -
The Mummy Unwrapped: American Guilt and Masochism
Tom Cruise is a product of the ’80s, the period when American movies gave up that mesmerizing 1970s spirit of self-examination and became fatally “high-concept.” Cruise’s recent string of action movies showcasing his bantam intrepidness have all been frenetically “... -
Baywatch’s Cultural Blindness
The new Baywatch movie, a reboot of the Nineties beach-set crime-and-melodrama TV series, continues Hollywood’s unoriginal marketing. It holds momentary interest for the way it adapts television culture (free, meaningless distraction) for a new era. On the big screen, ... -
A Laddish Hero Earns His Crown in King Arthur
Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword first looks like a video game, then it borrows from assorted action-adventure films – Gladiator, 300, Lord of the Rings – as if genre imitation was necessary to hold the audience’s interest ... -
Obit Gives Us an Inside Look at Inside Journalism. It’s Not Pretty.
A new documentary about the New York Times arrives at just the moment America’s newspaper of record presents itself as something that stands not for news but for power, partisanship, and elitism. It’s titled “Obit,” perhaps in a ... -
Davies’s Emily Dickinson Film Is a Fine and Furious Work of Art
Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius in Amherst, Mass., where she lived around the time of the ... -
Making Art or Making Hate?
Alec Baldwin takes the charm out of the animated film The Boss Baby. Doing the voice of the title character, a newborn infant whose insistent demands challenge the family life of his young parents, Baldwin plays to type: court jester ... -
Faithless Disney, Empty Malick
The classic 1946 French version of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) featured an opening epigraph that explained the concept behind director Jean Cocteau’s live-action fairy tale: “Children believe what we tell them. They have complete ... -
A True Elevator Story
New Yorkers are known for their rudeness even when the intent is progressive compassion. This morning when heading for a press-courtesy movie screening, I entered a Midtown office building elevator, following behind a short Latino-looking couple. The man pressed a ... -
Return of the Get-Whitey Movie
What was it, exactly, that the all-media screening audience at the new movie Get Out was cheering for when the black protagonist killed an entire family of white folks one by one? Get Out isn’t simply a revenge thriller; ... -
Perfume-Commercial Sex in the New Fifty Shades
In Fifty Shades Darker, the annual episode of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, the kind of frolicking we’d see in a perfume commercial demonstrates Hollywood’s dishonest combination of prurience and prudery. Career girl/call girl Anastasia (Dakota ... -
20th Century Women Is a Stale Feminist Diatribe
The best thing about Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is a title that immediately tells us two things: 1) Its sexual politics are dated, and 2) its story will focus on outmoded cultural ideals. This is the same erroneous basis of ... -
Crises and Faith and Filmmaking
Martin Scorsese’s Silence almost offers a perfect allegory for godlessness in the age of Gawker and BuzzFeed. Set in the 17th century, the film depicts Japan’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converts. It follows two young Portuguese Jesuits, ... -
The Twelfth Annual Better-Than List
It’s no accident that the very best movies of 2016 challenged the mainstream and were not from Hollywood. Too many American filmmakers have lost the ability to look at human experience without cheapening our responses to it. Our most urgent ... -
Patriots Day Rises to the Occasion
Peter Berg’s Patriots Day, about the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, combines action-movie flash with commemorative-movie solemnity. Surprisingly, the competing genres even each other out: Neither insultingly exploitative nor piously dignified, it is a nearly ideal example of pop-art historical ... -
Damien Chazelle Peddles Gimmicks. Huppert Reigns Supreme.
Why is La La Land so charmless yet so wildly overpraised? It is the work of 31-year-old Damien Chazelle, a movie buff turned director who has no knack for the popular culture he imitates and who is temperamentally distanced from ... -
Progressives Will Always Have Casablanca — Unfortunately
It’s more than coincidence that the Brad Pitt–Marion Cotillard World War II spy romance Allied starts out in Casablanca. The love story between Canadian airman Max Vatan (Pitt) and French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) begins in French-occupied ... -
Controlling the Narrative
As a science-fiction film with political undertones, Arrival improves on the 2009 District 9, in which an alien orb also hovered above Earth and panicked civilization. Arrival is distinguished by its spiritual overtones, a hallmark of director Denis Villeneuve, who uses the ... -
Hollywood Players’ Inferno
In the era of movie franchises, none has been more offensive than Ron Howard’s series adapting novelist Dan Brown’s best-selling potboilers that began with The Da Vinci Code, continued with Angels and Demons, and now befouls the marketplace ... -
Female Victims, Male Abusers, Revenge of the Sisters in the Very Boring, Very Politically Correct Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train, last week’s top box-office film, is so thoroughly lousy that it augurs a horrible future for the American movie-going plebiscite. This woman’s revenge story (dramatized in triplicate, with Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, and ... -
Hollywood’s Slavery Franchise
Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation simply isn’t emotional or visionary enough to erase the impact and importance of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation. It takes more than chutzpah to make a great ... -
The 13th via the Un-talented Tenth
Would W. E. B. DuBois, the prophetic sociologist, author, and negro activist of the last century, approve of the instantly celebrated race documentary titled “The 13th”? Director Ava DuVernay’s nonfiction film interprets the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which officially ... -
Hollywood Running Mates
Actor Denzel Washington (born in 1954) and director Antoine Fuqua (born in 1966) belong to the generations excited by the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. Their latest collaboration, The Magnificent Seven, a reboot of the 1960 Hollywood film, shows no sign that they ... -
American Psychic Wounds: Clint Eastwood’s Sully
In Clint Eastwood’s Sully, the title refers to more than just a man’s nickname; it’s a term for the disparagement and distrust that Americans now regularly inflict on each other. A movie about the emergency landing of ... -
The Obamas’ Romantic Moral Shift
Southside with You idealizes Chicago law-school graduate Michelle Robinson’s first date with Barack Hussein Obama — the couple that eventually became the 44th president of the United States and his First Lady. This virtuous rendezvous is less a convincing love ... -
Lost in Animation
The best moment in recent animated films was The Lego Movie song, “Everything Is Awesome!!” An uproarious satire on this consumer age’s feel-good propaganda, it also critiqued the forced progressivism that infects everything from Apple gadgets and Pixar movies ... -
Jason Bourne’s Tough Guy Politics
A resolute Matt Damon aiming a Heckler and Koch USP (universal self-loading pistol) in the advertising poster for Jason Bourne tells all you need to know about liberal hypocrisy. The movie itself tells less, given the filmmakers’ attempt to obfuscate ... -
Who We Aren't
‘That’s not who we are,” a familiar presidential entreaty, came to mind after watching Woody Allen’s Café Society and the new Ghostbusters. Each film offers a comical view of American types, but enjoyment may depend on whether one ... -
The Notorious BFG
Some Spielberg watchers, of whom I am one, have had cause for concern: Can the great populist filmmaker ever regain his popular touch? Ignore box-office receipts and consider what’s become of his once-unifying, art-advancing cultural expression. Spielberg’s collaboration ... -
Disney’s Fishy Doctrine
‘There are no walls in the ocean” goes the concluding moral of Finding Dory, the latest social message from what can be considered the Disney Doctrine. But what about nature’s great barrier reef, the one known as Taste? Disney’...
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Clint Eastwood’s Other America
Playing themselves as train passengers in The 15:17 to Paris, Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler — the three young Americans who on August 21, 2015, spontaneously subdued and walloped an Islamic terrorist, thus preventing mass murder on board the Thalys No. 9364 train — ... -
Night of the Living Dead: Return of the Politically Repressed
The Night of the Living Dead, which premiered 50 years ago, reinvented the horror film as a genre that relayed contemporary social anxiety — specifically about race. Now it is rereleased as a Criterion Blu-Ray DVD to celebrate Black History Month. The ... -
The Greatest Showman and Darkest Hour: Showmanship and Leadership
The Greatest Showman, about Phineas T. Barnum, is interesting mostly for its politics while Darkest Hour, about Winston Churchill, is ideological theater. That may seem topsy-turvy but it reflects the fact that we have entered a strange (dark?) period in ... -
The 13th Annual Better-Than List
Ten Best Lists are Fake News and have been for years. Peruse local media nationwide in any year — but especially this year — and see the same movies rubberstamped because most reviewers, enslaved to studio publicists, pay attention only to highly ... -
Spielberg Rides Politics’ Slippery Slope
‘Stop watching the news” is the savvy advice Morrissey sings on his politically oriented, recently released album. He then explains: “Because the news contrives to frighten you / To make you feel small and alone / To make you feel that your ... -
The Deplorables Come to the Movies
Hollywood hits bottom this week, not from more sex-and-revenge scandals but with premieres of I, Tonya and The Disaster Artist — the two most hateful movies I’ve seen in 2017. Both films are derisive reenactments of real-life stories: the ice-skating scandal ... -
Call Me by Your Name: Idealized Sex between an Adult Man and a Nubile Teen
The widely acclaimed Call Me by Your Name dares romanticize a youth-to-adult sexual relationship. It’s dressed-up as both nostalgia — set in 1983 — and Continental sophistication: Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) becomes obsessed with Oliver (Armie Hammer), his father’s 24-year-old ... -
Justice League Is the Epic We Deserve
‘Keep it moving,” Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) commands her Amazon soldiers in Justice League as they prevent supervillain Steppenwolf from stealing a “Mother Box,” one of three mysterious components that form life’s ultimate energy source. This is the moment ... -
Orient Express and Three Billboards: Cynicism and Snark
For weeks now, a critic friend has responded to each pop-up Facebook ad for the Murder on the Orient Express remake with a simple comment: “They all did it.” More than just a clever show of movie memory, that democratically ... -
First Ladies Rule
Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson — better known as “Lady Bird,” wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States — finally gets recognition at the movies this week. Two new films, LBJ and Lady Bird, unexpectedly remind us that ... -
The Square Might Be the Film of the Year
Ruben Ostlund’s The Square presents itself as a satire of the age — perhaps the satire of our age since it addresses the incivility that is now inescapable after the 2016 election. Cool indifference is what lies behind the feigned social ... -
A Black-History Fashion Show
Thurgood Marshall’s haberdashery was his most significant trait according to the new bio-pic Marshall — out-flashing his successful argument before the Supreme Court that resulted in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that outlawed public-school segregation. The film ... -
American Made and Mark Felt: Heroes in Crisis
Tom Cruise’s southern accent as pilot and smuggler Barry Seal in American Made twangs with good-old-boy warmth when he asks a bribing CIA agent, “This is my bag [of cash]? This my plane? This my hangar?” The gifts that ... -
Mother! and Brad’s Status Indulge Personal Neuroses
After destroying the prelapsarian world in Noah, indie director Darren Aronofsky has returned to his formula. In his sensationalized allegory Mother! Aronofsky sends a nameless woman (Jennifer Lawrence) through a gauntlet of masochistic paranoia, blames modern male chauvinism, and then ... -
Fist Fight’s Final American Solution
Fist Fight was released last February just after the “Punch a Nazi” meme went viral, but now the movie is back; its home-video release tying in with the Left’s lenience toward Antifa anarchy. This coincidence suggests that violence has ... -
When Czars Resign
When I read about the president’s entire Arts Council resigning, I cheered. Who expected that a handful of America’s culture czars would, surprisingly, step out of the way and give up their undemocratic, though tax-funded, authority? The resigners ... -
Good Time: A Thrill Ride in Post-Obama America
The Oscar-nominated Somali immigrant Barkhad Abdi brought a non-professional’s awkward conviction to his modern-day Somali pirate line “I’m the captain now” in Tom Hanks’s Captain Phillips by unexpectedly tapping in to menacing hip-hop satire. Now Abdi makes ... -
Atomic Blonde and From the Land of the Moon Trade in Feminist Propaganda
Charlize Theron and Marion Cotillard outstrip Meryl Streep’s political grandstanding through their all-out physical embodiment of the moment’s anxieties and silliness. This week, both actresses engage in political costume-play. Theron dresses up as an MI6 killer-chick in Atomic ... -
Girls Trip and Bronx Gothic: Two Visions of Post-Obama Black Empowerment
Part of the mess that Barack Obama left in the wake of his two presidential terms is the utter confusion that has descended upon black Americans who still feel stressed despite the media-promoted privilege of witnessing “the first African-American president.” ... -
Okja and Pop Aye Are Childish Propaganda
It’s baffling how often moviegoers who consider themselves politically savvy fall for assaults on their principles when the offense is disguised as “entertainment.” This week’s example is Okja, a new movie by Bong Joon-ho, the Korean director beloved ... -
The Book of Henry vs. Maudie
Before praising Maudie, the lovely bio-pic featuring an amazing characterization by Sally Hawkins as Canadian painter Maudie Lewis, some commentary on the pertinence of movies and moral responsibility must come first. This week’s opening of the revenge drama The ... -
What Does a Wonder Womanchild Want?
Is Diana of Themyscira, the super Amazon heroine played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, a character or an icon? The Wonder Woman movie, part of the Zack Snyder DC Comics universe magnificently dramatized in Man of Steel and Batman ... -
The Atheist Covenant
Ultra-hack Ridley Scott has ruined the Alien franchise. His first episode in 1979 was a visually textured, erotic genre film that veered sensually and sensationally into techno-evolutionary horror. It was that decade’s most original scary movie. But Alien: Covenant, the ... -
The New Dr. Strangelove
The Circle should have been the Dr. Strangelove of the millennium, confronting how we learned to stop worrying and love digital technology and dystopia, too. Dystopian movies are not simply a form of entertainment; it’s a genre devoted to ... -
In The Lost City of Z, the Lost Art of Adventure Films
James Gray’s unendurable The Lost City of Z tells of a white man’s folly. British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), wanting to improve his social status and family name, explored South America in 1925, searching for the fabled ... -
Three Conflicted Movies about Moral Conflicts: Graduation, The Assignment, and Colossal
Three movies this week confront our inner dictator. The most obvious is Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (Bacalaureat), in which a middle-aged Romanian doctor, Romeo (Adrian Titieni), compromises himself as a husband, father, and citizen. He enters the subculture of secret ... -
CHiPs: Law-and-Order Comedy in the Age of Panic
Hollywood hasn’t yet caught up with the moral panic of the past year and a half, so a movie such as CHiPs — a theatrical version of the 1977–1983 TV series about the California Highway Patrol — reflects the general ... -
Kong: Skull Island’s Bread and Circuses 2.0
Set in 1973, Kong: Skull Island repackages Hollywood’s 1933 King Kong along with other action-adventure movie trivia. Its story takes place three years before the unfairly maligned Seventies remake that starred Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Kong swatting fighter jets from ... -
At the Oscars: Revenge of the Hollywood Crybullies
The moment La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz ripped the Academy Awards announcement card from Warren Beatty’s hands told you everything you need to know about the brattiness of La La Land and the people who made it. Caught ... -
The Great Wall, on the Border of Art
When a blockbuster titled “The Great Wall” opens now at the beginning of a new political administration that pledges to “build a wall” as U.S. border protection, it’s a delirious coincidence. Hollywood’s storytelling and money-making impulses collide ... -
Heroes Debunked
Ask me to name my favorite contemporary actor and I’d say Robert De Niro quicker than I could endorse any politician. But De Niro disgraces himself in The Comedian. In the time between the start of filming and the ... -
Revisiting Pop and Classical Traditions
Vin Diesel’s role as the beloved Iraq War soldier whose sacrifice is memorialized by the protagonist of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk represented a peak of American cultural iconography. His phantom appearances acknowledged the civic participation of unenfranchised ... -
Meryl Streep Miscasts Herself
The critic Pauline Kael back in the Eighties drew a bead on the fantastically acclaimed Meryl Streep, observing that the actress “makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.” That annoying habit of Steep’s was still evident ... -
Sense vs. Nonsense
Before the Black Lives Matter craze exacerbated contemporary attitudes about race and black social continuity, playwright August Wilson’s Fences articulated a black tribal viewpoint of the ambition, grievance, and assorted religious, sexual, and political beliefs borne by African American ... -
Rogue One’s Childishness and Trite Politics
My experience with watching the Star Wars franchise as an adult could be summed up during a key moment, in Return of the Jedi, that fans of the series consider a turning point in Western narrative tradition: Incredulous, I turned ... -
Jackie Reminds Us: Political Celebrities Once Had a Modicum of Self-Awareness
Natalie Portman’s impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy in the movie Jackie explores the emotional balancing act of a famous woman, wife of the most powerful man in the world, intimate witness to his murder, and inadvertent political player on the ... -
The Close-Up and the Impersonal
Ang Lee’s new movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is based on a true story — even though, officially, it is adapted from a best-selling novel by Ben Fountain. The film’s “truth” comes from its sensitivity to two ... -
Man’s Inhumanity to Mel
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless ... -
Moonlight: A Plea for Pity for a Black, Gay Statistic
Moonlight is structured in three parts, separating the case history of a black gay Florida youth into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Each phase is titled by nicknames — Little, Chiron, Black — that were bestowed and then, eventually, self-chosen so that identity ... -
After the Debate: Fact-Checking Hollywood Propaganda
When film critic Hillary Clinton, in the October 9 debate, raved about having seen “the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called ‘Lincoln,’” saying it was “a master class watching president Lincoln get the congress to approve the 13th amendment,” she confirmed a ... -
Intolerance Is the Greatest Movie Ever Made
For many critics and scholars — myself among them — D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, ... -
American Eccentrics — True and False
‘I blame popular culture,” armored-car security guard David Ghantt says to explain his part in a $17 million robbery recounted in the new comedy Masterminds. It’s a good satirical alibi because it lays blame on the process that distracts people ... -
Home-Grown Sedition
Oliver Stone flubs the opportunity to show us the process of radicalization when he portrays Edward Snowden, the subject of his latest political bio-pic, Snowden, as just another all-American lost boy — a sentimental version of how Stone views himself. That’... -
The Return of Radical Chic
Forty years ago this month, the New York Film Festival premiered Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. It was Swiss director Alain Tanner’s bemused look at counterculture habits following Europe’s attempt at revolution in May 1968. Tanner’s ... -
B-Movie Incumbents
Blood Father is a better return of Mad Max than last year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, because Mel Gibson, the original roustabout, comes back on a motorbike trailblazing a wake-up vision of himself and of America’s generational relations. ... -
The Modern Allegories of Suicide Squad
Think metaphorically. The war between fans of DC Comics and Marvel Comics is almost as vicious as that between Republicans and Democrats. The current controversy over Suicide Squad — Marvel kids are going on the Internet to attack any proposed DC ... -
The Star Trek Cult and the Art-Movie Cult
The Star Trek television and film franchise was always multicultural; then it became a pop cult; and now it boasts all of that as a social manifesto. This franchise enterprise’s entire one-world allegorical pretense — as seen in ... -
The Mid-Year Reckoning
When I started the Mid-Year Reckoning back in 2003, the idea was to break up that end-of-year best-of habit, and simultaneously oppose the summer-blockbuster mentality by reminding readers that film culture still offered good movies. Now, imitators across the Internet routinely ... -
A State-of-the-World Movie
Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is not only a state-of-the-art movie, it’s a state-of-the-world movie. This means that although the film cracks open hilarious, jaw-dropping perplexities in modern American life, it also recognizes everyday tragedies. The eponymous dachshund, who travels ... -
Taking the Politics Out of Movies
Brian De Palma’s 1978 thriller The Fury is his greatest film. It has exemplary visual rhythm, emotional excitation tied to the concept of loyalty, and complex references to film history — plus, it has proven to be politically prescient. The Fury ...