At first blush, the new hit film Joker seems to hit all the right notes for progressive audiences. It floats various left-wing talking points: the need for health care and social services for all levels of society, the great divide between the average person…
Only a director mad as Ahab would try to make a Moby Dick movie — so John Huston had all the right qualifications. The 6-foot-2, oak-throated director of The Maltese Falcon (1941) wanted throughout the 1940s and early ’50s to adapt Herman…
Quentin Tarantino just became the most reactionary major filmmaker this side of Clint Eastwood. His latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, portrays the year the counterculture almost broke Hollywood, 1969, and Tarantino may accomplish the same thing five…
In every period between James Bond movies, the progressive chorus starts singing the same tiresome two songs, right on key. Song No. 1 chants that it’s time for a black Bond, a female Bond, or a gay Bond, and they’ve…
I was a politics junkie. Always watching cable news, clicking on political websites, listening to talk radio. The operative word here is “was.” It all got to me, in its maddening, frustrating ubiquity. I got tired of the constant stimulation,…
The long cinematic drought since “Avengers: Infinity War,” with the brief comedic interloping of “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” has finally been broken with the much-hyped “Captain Marvel” starring Brie Larson, Samuel Jackson, Clark Gregg, Ben Mendelsohn, and others. After seeing…
Last week I had the chance to watch “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” which is the 20th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The sequel to the 2015 “Ant-Man,” which grossed about $519.3 million worldwide, it again stars Paul Rudd as…
In the excellent “The Big Sick” Kumail Nanjiani tells an immigrant’s love story. His faith stays where it belongs: in the personal, not the public space.
Imagine a man comes along, falls in love with a beautiful girl, gets her pregnant, and leaves, visiting once in a while. He plants a seed (a seed of destruction, it turns out) in this woman’s world and then leaves…