Seriously, Watch Ozark
This is a show that seems to be built on the suffering of fallen humanity, grounded in realism, and set against the backdrop of a very gray and gothic middle America.
In other words, it’s great.
Review| The Quarry
Scott Teems’ new film, The Quarry, strikes upon two of my deepest obsessions: southern gothic literature and music. It doesn’t have the magical realism of True Detective’s first season and it doesn’t have the grotesquery of the characters of Flannery…
The Complicated Vengeance of Hunters
Nazis! Groovy Assassins! Al Pacino! What happens when you take the motives and violence of Taranitino’s Inglourious Basterds and mix it with the revelry and twisted humor of The Boondock Saints? You get Hunters. And it’s glorious. I will keep…
The Mere Breath of Winning in Uncut Gems
When director Martin Scorsese finally got a chance to see the first cut of Joshua and Benny Safdie’s 10-years-in-the-making Uncut Gems, he told them, “Don’t change a frame.” Having brought funding to the Safdie’s movie and raising the movie’s profile…
Review| Bad Boys For Life
Michael Bay took a backseat approach to the newest installment of the Bad Boys franchise—a franchise that was significant for how it brought black actors to the forefront in the beginning—as a producer and brought in Belgian directors, Adil &…
Self-Reflection and The Irishman
When I settled into my theater seat to watch The Irishman, I wasn’t prepared to enter Scorsese’s excellently crafted world of mobsters (and I definitely wasn’t ready for the 210-minute runtime). It was thrilling to experience the expert handling of…
Gavin O’ Connor’s Miracle (2004) & The Accountant (2016)
“But you looked at me and I could see your mother in your eyes I thought about the things she lost and how she always cries And how your daddy tries to fight the truth with Bombay gin And I…
S07 E01 – Joker and the Final Joke
On this episode of the Reel World Theology Podcast: There has been a lot of conversation (and worry) about the effect that the new Joker film could have on our culture. While this may be another case of over-reaction to…
The Beloved Bombs of Paul Williams: Phantom of the Paradise (1974) Meets Bugsy Malone (1976)
Paul Williams was on quite a roll in the early 1970s. He’d written monster hits for groups like The Carpenters (“We’ve Only Just Begun”) and Three Dog Night (“An Old Fashioned Love Song”) and become a near-regular on The Tonight…
Knives Out: A Colliding Kindness
Whodunits require a lot from both creator and viewer. This is because they’re actually carved from two stories, woven together as a “double narrative”— one is the secret, behind-the-scenes, cloak-and-dagger story of what really happened to cause the death of…
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