You almost had it. For the first 114 minutes of its 134-minute running time, Black Panther is a really good movie. Those 114 minutes are exactly what we’ve come to expect from a Marvel Studios movie – fun, witty, and visually excellent, with memorable characters you cannot wait to see more of in future movies.…

I, Tonya (2017) concludes my movie viewing before the Team Ruthless Oscar article. This was a very good movie with terrific acting. I also conclude that the characters portrayed within this film are a somber portrait of why we have Donald Trump as President. I, Tonya is a hybrid of a documentary, a dark comedy,…

I have always liked Armie Hammer. Who doesn’t? The last 3 of his movies reviewed were The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Nocturnal Animals and Free Fire. I enjoyed those movies immensely, but nothing prepared me for the masterpiece Call Me by Your Name. Armie was brilliant, but Timothee Chalamet (Lady Bird) owned it as the 17…

The Shape of Water has been nominated for an incredible 13 Oscars. That’s about 12 too many. Kevin tried to warn me about this film, but at the urging of a friend, I saw it anyway. Guillermo Del Toro made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was a beautiful film, and one of my favorites. The cinematography in…

Running in circles. With The Hunger Games series concluding more than two years ago and the Divergent series crashing and burning with its third film, the so-called Young Adult genre has all but died in the film world. That is not to say studios aren’t still trying to find the next Hunger Games, but they…

With Phantom Thread we have a movie set in England in the boring 50’s. This is a film about a dressmaker, a very good dressmaker. Reynolds Woodcock was more than just a designer of women’s dresses. He was a genius, a high-level artist, and one who was so good that all sorts of born-rich fools,…

I did not see that coming. Raise your hand if you get super excited when you first hear about a new Gerard Butler movie. Anyone? No? Okay, raise your hand if you loved 300 and forgave Butler for doing bad rom-coms like The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter. Still nothing, huh? How about this…

In Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill characterizes the antithesis of university students the world over, and succeeds in making a series of intelligent decisions whilst extremely drunk. The film captures the crushing pressure borne by Churchill at a time when Britain seemed small and alone in the face of a military supremacy never-before encountered in history.…

Molly Blum was not the wife of the fictional Leopold Blum in the unreadable book Ulysses, but a real-life Olympic skier. She was also a daddy-baiting, Freud-hating, and impossibly gorgeous savant with a strange, situational ethics moral compass. Instead of pursuing a career in law or another high-paying discipline, she decided to stick it to…

Like Murder on the Orient Express, but not. Happy 2018 everybody. As we welcome in 2018, I’m hoping to spend a lot of executive time in my shithole. If you were wishing for 2018 to be a fresh start, keep on wishing everybody. On behalf of all non-deplorable Americans, I apologize to Haiti, El Salvador,…