Part I of Martin Bourboulon’s newest iteration of The Three Musketeers made it onto my list of personal favorites from 2023. I was decidedly cooler towards Milady, so I’ve spent the better part of a week trying to decide whether: a) I overvalued the first film; or, b) The second film is inferior in some way to the first. After due deliberation, I’ll take door number three. I think the film really is fun, and I think Bourboulon’s visual style breathes energy into what could be a stiff genre. More importantly, it’s grounded in enough grit to avoid the camp feelings that might be connected by swo ..read more

When I was a college undergraduate in the mid-1980s, I participated in a “debate” with the campus Atheist. I didn’t particularly want to do it– at least I don’t remember wanting to do it — but I convinced myself that refusing to participate would “send the wrong message” to …someone. I remember winning rather handily, by which I mean that all the people who came to hear me stand up for what they already believed told me I did. I would not be at all surprised if my antagonist believed the same for the same reasons. Years later, I had a private conversation with the same guy, and he shared some ..read more

“Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” _- Abraham Lincoln. Civil War assiduously avoids providing any sort of backstory that might lead to a judgment about the sides warring, because, no doubt, if it did, there is no way the film could be made. But that decision makes the movie cynical and pointless. War is hell. Who knew? Here’s the thing, by framing around the journalists it tries to co-opt the journalist’s credo. We don’t take sides. We remain neutral. And I don’t really ..read more

The Long Game is like a large balloon tethered to the earth by a long but strong rope. It flies high enough, and it occasionally pulls against the constraints keeping it from going higher or farther afield. You enjoy the view, and maybe you wonder what could be if it ever broke free. Such is the devil’s bargain of sports flicks. The formula is tried and true, and hardly risks failure. But the same traits that make it dependable also make it predictable and unexceptional. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we get a movie that breaks free of the conventions and becomes riskier, edgier, and more daring ..read more

Every time a new Ozon film comes out, I start and eventually abandon an introduction where I try to make a comparison between his work and that of some American (or English-speaking) filmmaker with whom the average viewer might be more familiar. The name I keep coming back to is Steven Spielberg, but anticipating the eye-rolls such a comparison would get makes me think comparisons may not be all that helpful. Are they stylistic comparisons? Comparisons of themes? Popularity? Very few exercises bring my reservations about auteur theory to the surface faster than asking for specifics about how a ..read more

There is a scene in Season 3 of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom where Will (Jeff Daniels) interviews an Environmental Protection Agency official about climate change. The news anchor repeatedly tries to pivot from the alarming facts of the story to a glimmer of hope or even a last-minute call for drastic measures, but his guest repeatedly rebuffs the attempts, insisting that the situation is now hopeless. He compares the human population of the earth to a human, in a locked garage and a running car, already unconscious from the carbon monoxide but not yet dead. Absent some external intervention ..read more

I can tell you the exact moment the movie lost me. David, our hero, has traveled to the Dominican Republic to sell his deceased father’s “mansion” after receiving the sort of inheritance that used to only happen in Dickens novels. While there he falls in love with the local culture in general and his pretty young real-estate agent, Maria, in particular. The mix of Orientalism (exotic otherness of the indigenous people) and colonialism (an average guy with a failing bookstore in America becomes Prince Charming in a third-world paradise), is uncomfortable to begin with. He’s got a girlfriend/fia ..read more

I haven’t seen a Hallmark film in years, and I find myself largely indifferent to the charms of Bridgerton, the most prominent example of mixed-race casting I can think of that is popular at the current moment. So it would be fair to say that my expectations while approaching Hallmark’s “Mahogany Presentation” of Sense and Sensibility were…low. The hallmark of a gentleman in Austenland is the ability to admit when he is wrong, and, well, I was wrong. The new production stays faithful to the plot of Austen’s beloved novel while highlighting themes that are embedded in it. Jane Austen is too oft ..read more

It is hard for me to fault The Road Dance for being about what it is about, but … I have seen so many stories over the yers about women being assaulted, women being beaten, women being raped, I live in an age on numb indifference, and that’s a place I don’t want to be. Is that the movie’s fault? The majority of reviews I have seen praise Hermione Corfield for her sensitive performance as Kirsty Macleod, and I agree. Kirsty is young and in love and loved in return by Murdo (Will Fletcher). But Murdo is called to go to war, and war parts young lovers, sometimes for a season, sometimes for longer ..read more

The Teachers’ Lounge is a nasty little mousetrap of a movie. It is one of those films where circumstances spiral from bad to worse while basically well-intentioned people get more and more entangled in the slippery slope of unintended consequences to seemingly innocent decisions. The two films it most reminds me of are Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. One of those two, I loved. The other I hated. So, what’s the difference, and which one did The Teachers’ Lounge most resemble? All three films present nightmarish, at-times Kafkaesque, scenarios. The main difference, f ..read more