Eleven years after seeing The Hurt Locker for the first and only time, the scene that’s most ingrained in my memory has nothing to do with IEDs in a godforsaken desert. It’s Jeremy Renner back home, lost in the supermarket, stymied by a wall of cereal. Describing a kind of domestic impotence, it remains the quintessential poetic image of war’s addictive pull. The battlefield … [Read more...]
As critique of the zeitgeist, ‘Vox Lux’ falls flat
Any film that adopts as its subtitle “A Twenty-First Century Portrait” better be profound enough to live up to such a grandiose decree. Writer-director Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux does indeed have millennial zeitgeist on its mind, from the new normal of mass shootings to post-9/11 malaise to the deification of celebrity. But Corbet’s film is a purely academic exercise, written … [Read more...]
‘Eating Animals’ shocks, depresses, but is unlikely to bring change
In the opening minutes of Eating Animals, as a car drives through miles of unspoiled farmland, plaintive music plants us firmly in the fertile breadbasket of America —land of opportunity, land of natural beauty, land of plenty. Ah, but what a false promise it is. Look a little deeper, and that pink-hued body of water isn’t a natural spring; it’s a pool of hog urine and fecal … [Read more...]
Film in 2016: The year’s 10 best
Whether it was because of the commotion over last year’s all-white Oscar nominations or simply a coincidence of the pipeline, this year’s top film crop has several entries with racial themes and likely African-American nominees in the performance categories. Here, in descending order of quality – as judged by my highly subjective opinion – are the best of 2016: … [Read more...]