Author: Ezra Stead

I saw this in April of 2009 and the rest of the year failed to produce a more perfect film. Director Steve McQueen (not the one I was thinking of, as it turned out) crafts a completely compelling take on the famed hunger strike endured by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and other political prisoners associated…

If you are familiar with Adam Sandler movies, this is exactly what you have come to expect. Whether that means you will enjoy it, or how much that is even possible for you, may vary. Less familiarity might actually equate to greater enjoyment, as you will be less annoyed and distracted by the references and…

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.  The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.  At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it “occurred.” With these words Joel and Ethan Coen open their unassailable masterpiece (one…

At the risk of gaining a reputation as some sort of lunatic who insists on reading way too much into the subtext of popular 80s movies, the 1985 werewolf movie Silver Bullet is about priests molesting children.  The “priest” in question here is actually a Reverend, which indicates he is not in fact a Catholic…

A few years after enacting a disgustingly doomed romance in The Fly, real-life husband-and-wife Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis went on to play a similarly weird but much less doomed couple in Julien Temple’s 1988 cult classic Earth Girls Are Easy. Unlike The Fly, which was dark and deep enough to warrant speculation about its…

After the success of their rightly acclaimed, Oscar-winning 2007 hit No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers made two dry, dark comedies in a row, neither of which has garnered the same level of praise as their brooding Texas masterpiece. Though Burn After Reading (2008) has developed a substantial cult following since its release,…