Sometimes the meaning of a life is revealed at the end of it. We’ve seen that in film for decades, and perhaps the best example of this is Citizen Kane.* After a meteoric rise and a life spent in journalism and the halls of power, Charles Foster Kane is moments away from death. He whispers, “Rosebud,” and as the film commences, we learn that all the power and prestige in the world is meaningless without love. A real life tends to be messier. Sometimes that’s problematic, and reality is jettisoned in favor of a narrative. The end result might look a bit like Braveheart, a cracking... Read More

Folks, I’d like to apologize up front for this review of Venom. To put things into context, we’re going to have to make a deep dive into nerdery. I know! I can hear your eyes rolling from here. We’ll make this quick, I promise. In 1988, The Amazing Spider-Man #300 was published.* That comic book introduced Venom, an enemy of the wall-crawler. Built like a weightlifter and utterly vicious, he’s got the same powers as ya boi Spidey, along with extremely flexible morals. Totally unsurprisingly, the character was an instant hit, beloved by edgelords** before edgelords were a thing. But isn’t... Read More

A great film doesn’t have to be subtle. Sometimes it shouldn’t be, depending on what the story is about and how it is told. Oliver Stone is genetically incapable of subtlety, but JFK and Platoon are a couple of the greatest movies ever made. Along similar lines, one of the big myths in filmmaking is that a great film is birthed out of a difficult production. Francis Ford Coppola nearly went insane making Apocalypse Now. Werner Herzog almost murdered his leading man and forced laborers to drag a steamship through the jungle during the filming of Fitzcarraldo. Uncooperative puppets... Read More

Most films have flaws, that’s a given. But there are a few of them out there that are perfect. So much so that you can’t imagine cutting a scene, or removing a performance. They tell their story correctly, with intelligence, style and honesty.  Goodfellas is perfect. No Country For Old Men is perfect. The Silence Of The Lambs is perfect. The Princess Bride is perfect. Mad Max: Fury Road is perfect. By all rights, it shouldn’t be. It’s the fourth film in a franchise, which is often the point where the filmmakers desperately hope somebody, anybody, sees it before... Read More

From 1978 to 1990, Andrei Chikatilo murdered at least 52 women and children in Soviet Russia. Putting aside the grim fact that it’s fiendishly difficult to capture a serial killer under any circumstances, Chikatilo enjoyed a unique advantage. It was widely believed in Soviet circles that murder in general, and serial murder in particular, was a uniquely Western phenomenon that couldn’t possibly occur in the USSR. Blinded by ideology, investigators instead persecuted innocent homosexuals, believing homosexuality to be a dangerous mental illness. Good thing nothing like that ever happens... Read More