Heroes are OK but when it comes to memorability, villains tend to piss all over ’em. This glaring divergence has long plagued creators and can be traced back at least as far as Shakespeare. Take The Merchant of Venice. Shylock’s vengeful demand for a pound of flesh ensures his status as an all-time bad guy,…

It’s award consideration season, so here’s my consideration. Synopsis Won’t anyone pay attention to what’s really happening? Writing I don’t know what’s really happening. The film has a very distinct three act structure that would have been better suited as vignettes. The first act introduces Professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), an expert in Adolf Hitler…

Going into Darren Aronofsky’s latest film The Whale, I prepared myself for at least one disturbing scene that would sear itself into my brain next to scenes from Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. Like Stanley Kubrick, Aronofsky tends to make weird and dark movies, some of which feature scenes you cannot unsee. To…

The corrupt: Jim McAllister in Election (1999) The perfect companion piece to the iconic Ferris Bueller. Here we get to see Broderick play a character at the opposite end of the spectrum. Bueller was an exuberant livewire beating the system but the vanilla, sensibly dressed McAllister in his nerdy car is the loser that always…

It’s a rare occurrence when a movie or series shows something that stops every random thought in my head, every synapse focusing like a laser on the screen. I become Neo in The Matrix when Morpheus leaps to a distant building. “Whoa” is the only correct response. It happened the first time I saw the…

The wrongly accused: Lucas in The Hunt aka Jagten (2012) Back in the 90s I covered a newspaper story in which a run of the mill, middle-aged sex offender was having a bit of a tough time. He’d been sent to clink for touching up some residents at a women’s shelter. In his favor, the…