Armond White
A
rmond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.
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Part of the mess that Barack Obama left in the wake of his two presidential terms is the utter confusion that has descended upon black Americans who still feel stressed despite the media-promoted privilege of witnessing “the first African-American president.” ... -
Okja and Pop Aye Are Childish Propaganda
It’s baffling how often moviegoers who consider themselves politically savvy fall for assaults on their principles when the offense is disguised as “entertainment.” This week’s example is Okja, a new movie by Bong Joon-ho, the Korean director beloved ... -
The Book of Henry vs. Maudie
Before praising Maudie, the lovely bio-pic featuring an amazing characterization by Sally Hawkins as Canadian painter Maudie Lewis, some commentary on the pertinence of movies and moral responsibility must come first. This week’s opening of the revenge drama The ... -
What Does a Wonder Womanchild Want?
Is Diana of Themyscira, the super Amazon heroine played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, a character or an icon? The Wonder Woman movie, part of the Zack Snyder DC Comics universe magnificently dramatized in Man of Steel and Batman ... -
The Atheist Covenant
Ultra-hack Ridley Scott has ruined the Alien franchise. His first episode in 1979 was a visually textured, erotic genre film that veered sensually and sensationally into techno-evolutionary horror. It was that decade’s most original scary movie. But Alien: Covenant, the ... -
The New Dr. Strangelove
The Circle should have been the Dr. Strangelove of the millennium, confronting how we learned to stop worrying and love digital technology and dystopia, too. Dystopian movies are not simply a form of entertainment; it’s a genre devoted to ... -
In The Lost City of Z, the Lost Art of Adventure Films
James Gray’s unendurable The Lost City of Z tells of a white man’s folly. British military officer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), wanting to improve his social status and family name, explored South America in 1925, searching for the fabled ... -
Three Conflicted Movies about Moral Conflicts: Graduation, The Assignment, and Colossal
Three movies this week confront our inner dictator. The most obvious is Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (Bacalaureat), in which a middle-aged Romanian doctor, Romeo (Adrian Titieni), compromises himself as a husband, father, and citizen. He enters the subculture of secret ... -
CHiPs: Law-and-Order Comedy in the Age of Panic
Hollywood hasn’t yet caught up with the moral panic of the past year and a half, so a movie such as CHiPs — a theatrical version of the 1977–1983 TV series about the California Highway Patrol — reflects the general ... -
Kong: Skull Island’s Bread and Circuses 2.0
Set in 1973, Kong: Skull Island repackages Hollywood’s 1933 King Kong along with other action-adventure movie trivia. Its story takes place three years before the unfairly maligned Seventies remake that starred Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Kong swatting fighter jets from ... -
At the Oscars: Revenge of the Hollywood Crybullies
The moment La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz ripped the Academy Awards announcement card from Warren Beatty’s hands told you everything you need to know about the brattiness of La La Land and the people who made it. Caught ... -
The Great Wall, on the Border of Art
When a blockbuster titled “The Great Wall” opens now at the beginning of a new political administration that pledges to “build a wall” as U.S. border protection, it’s a delirious coincidence. Hollywood’s storytelling and money-making impulses collide ... -
Heroes Debunked
Ask me to name my favorite contemporary actor and I’d say Robert De Niro quicker than I could endorse any politician. But De Niro disgraces himself in The Comedian. In the time between the start of filming and the ... -
Revisiting Pop and Classical Traditions
Vin Diesel’s role as the beloved Iraq War soldier whose sacrifice is memorialized by the protagonist of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk represented a peak of American cultural iconography. His phantom appearances acknowledged the civic participation of unenfranchised ... -
Meryl Streep Miscasts Herself
The critic Pauline Kael back in the Eighties drew a bead on the fantastically acclaimed Meryl Streep, observing that the actress “makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.” That annoying habit of Steep’s was still evident ... -
Sense vs. Nonsense
Before the Black Lives Matter craze exacerbated contemporary attitudes about race and black social continuity, playwright August Wilson’s Fences articulated a black tribal viewpoint of the ambition, grievance, and assorted religious, sexual, and political beliefs borne by African American ... -
Rogue One’s Childishness and Trite Politics
My experience with watching the Star Wars franchise as an adult could be summed up during a key moment, in Return of the Jedi, that fans of the series consider a turning point in Western narrative tradition: Incredulous, I turned ... -
Jackie Reminds Us: Political Celebrities Once Had a Modicum of Self-Awareness
Natalie Portman’s impersonation of Jacqueline Kennedy in the movie Jackie explores the emotional balancing act of a famous woman, wife of the most powerful man in the world, intimate witness to his murder, and inadvertent political player on the ... -
The Close-Up and the Impersonal
Ang Lee’s new movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is based on a true story — even though, officially, it is adapted from a best-selling novel by Ben Fountain. The film’s “truth” comes from its sensitivity to two ... -
Man’s Inhumanity to Mel
Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless ... -
Moonlight: A Plea for Pity for a Black, Gay Statistic
Moonlight is structured in three parts, separating the case history of a black gay Florida youth into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Each phase is titled by nicknames — Little, Chiron, Black — that were bestowed and then, eventually, self-chosen so that identity ... -
After the Debate: Fact-Checking Hollywood Propaganda
When film critic Hillary Clinton, in the October 9 debate, raved about having seen “the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called ‘Lincoln,’” saying it was “a master class watching president Lincoln get the congress to approve the 13th amendment,” she confirmed a ... -
Intolerance Is the Greatest Movie Ever Made
For many critics and scholars — myself among them — D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, ... -
American Eccentrics — True and False
‘I blame popular culture,” armored-car security guard David Ghantt says to explain his part in a $17 million robbery recounted in the new comedy Masterminds. It’s a good satirical alibi because it lays blame on the process that distracts people ... -
Home-Grown Sedition
Oliver Stone flubs the opportunity to show us the process of radicalization when he portrays Edward Snowden, the subject of his latest political bio-pic, Snowden, as just another all-American lost boy — a sentimental version of how Stone views himself. That’... -
The Return of Radical Chic
Forty years ago this month, the New York Film Festival premiered Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. It was Swiss director Alain Tanner’s bemused look at counterculture habits following Europe’s attempt at revolution in May 1968. Tanner’s ... -
B-Movie Incumbents
Blood Father is a better return of Mad Max than last year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, because Mel Gibson, the original roustabout, comes back on a motorbike trailblazing a wake-up vision of himself and of America’s generational relations. ... -
The Modern Allegories of Suicide Squad
Think metaphorically. The war between fans of DC Comics and Marvel Comics is almost as vicious as that between Republicans and Democrats. The current controversy over Suicide Squad — Marvel kids are going on the Internet to attack any proposed DC ... -
The Star Trek Cult and the Art-Movie Cult
The Star Trek television and film franchise was always multicultural; then it became a pop cult; and now it boasts all of that as a social manifesto. This franchise enterprise’s entire one-world allegorical pretense — as seen in ... -
The Mid-Year Reckoning
When I started the Mid-Year Reckoning back in 2003, the idea was to break up that end-of-year best-of habit, and simultaneously oppose the summer-blockbuster mentality by reminding readers that film culture still offered good movies. Now, imitators across the Internet routinely ... -
A State-of-the-World Movie
Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog is not only a state-of-the-art movie, it’s a state-of-the-world movie. This means that although the film cracks open hilarious, jaw-dropping perplexities in modern American life, it also recognizes everyday tragedies. The eponymous dachshund, who travels ... -
Taking the Politics Out of Movies
Brian De Palma’s 1978 thriller The Fury is his greatest film. It has exemplary visual rhythm, emotional excitation tied to the concept of loyalty, and complex references to film history — plus, it has proven to be politically prescient. The Fury ... -
New Roots for the Nation
The new $50 million remake of the television mini-series Roots can readily be avoided by viewers, but it’s not so easy to dismiss this latest instance of political and social coercion based on race manipulation. The 1977 Roots mini-series (produced by ... -
Neighbors 2 vs. Jane Austen Redux
So Occupy Wall Street finally comes to the big screen, but in an unexpected disguise, as Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, a carnival combining Millennial social movement and mob mentality. Canadian comic actor Seth Rogen retools his 2014 hit by translating youth privilege ... -
The Trashing of a Generation
Captain America: Civil War confirms our national dumb-down. While the mainstream media pretzel themselves over the presidential primaries, Marvel Studios has steadily accomplished a rejiggering of the American public’s cultural and political consciousness. Civil War completes this devolution in ... -
Measuring Love and Anger
Tom Hanks beats President Obama to Saudi Arabia in A Hologram for the King, in which an American business deal turns into a personal sanity-keeping mission. As information-technology salesman Alan Clay, who is assigned to pitch an IT system to ... -
Morale-Busters
The Freedom Tower, built to replace the World Trade Center towers destroyed on 9/11, makes its film debut in two new movies, Demolition and Louder than Bombs. Both titles evoke that world-changing tragedy, and each film deals with the shambles that ... -
Batman v Superman Returns Soul to Superheroes
Fanboys do not own the franchises of Batman and Superman movies, so director Zack Snyder went against the mob and dared to raise the genre to a level of adult sophistication in 2013’s Man of Steel, the most emotionally powerful ... -
Sacha Baron Cohen and Other Political Freex
‘I felt entitled,” amateur reporter David Cort confesses in Here Come the Videofreex, a documentary about a little-known slice of media history: In 1969, mainstream TV network CBS employed a group of counterculture youth (beamish renegades who called themselves the Videofreex) ... -
The Oscars: Ceremony or Sanctimony?
Anyone who fixes his social frustrations on the Academy Awards needs a new mode of protest. Followers of the frivolous #OscarSoWhite campaign confuse film-industry flattery with justice (“justice,” another currently misunderstood word). Sadly, all this nonsense is a continuation of ... -
Winning the Propaganda Game
Burt Lancaster’s virile example of earnestness, drive, and pure vitality in 1951’s Jim Thorpe–All-American inspired so much admiration — and identification — that one felt an emotional wallop as the bio-pic dramatized Thorpe’s heartbreak when racist opposition (including the ... -
Hailing God and Mammon
The Coens are back! That doesn’t mean their Hollywood spoof Hail, Caesar! is great fun; but at least they seem to be over the hipsterism that curdled Inside Llewyn Davis, and have returned to genuine cultural satire. Set in 1951, ... -
Concussion v. the Hijacking of the Civil-Rights Movement
Will Smith’s Concussion turns out to have an appropriate title. The hijacking of the civil-rights movement by today’s black race hustlers and white liberals, all acting through the sanctimonious media, produces a continuing series of blows to the ... -
Benghazi as Zombieland
Neither an exoneration of Hillary Clinton nor a clear explanation of the events of September 11, 2012, which left four Americans dead at the U.S. embassy in Libya’s capital, Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is something ... -
Perception and Puppets
‘Where’s the Joy?” a husband asked during a marital dispute in Alan Rudolph’s Mortal Thoughts (1991). His flustered quest for meaning, satisfaction (and a dishwashing product) captured the irony of working-class survival and consumerism. Rudolph’s priceless perception returns ... -
Star Wars Demystified
Everyone knows the Star Wars series peaked with that confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the villain, Darth Vader (played on screen by David Prowse, but voiced by James Earl Jones). The “Luke, I ... -
Chi-Raq’s Travesty of Hip-Hop Culture
Every Spike Lee film is a piece of agitprop, but few of them are entertaining. His newest, Chi-Raq, fails at both goals. The reasons why are as infuriating as today’s uninformative headlines. Instead of documenting the reality of Chicago ... -
Carol and Legend Falsify the Past They Exploit
Hollywood’s good old days could be sexually discreet yet more daring than is usually recognized. A startling, audacious moment in All about Eve (1950) showed Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) enlisting a female confederate to help effect her duplicitous ... -
Nihilism vs. Faith and Hope
Movies now revel in cynicism — so much so that the new immigrant romance Brooklyn is inadvertently suspenseful: The viewer waits for something to scuttle the film’s grace-filled buoyancy. Scenes in which two family members, separated by an ocean, exchange ... -
Film as Ideological Weapon
When it comes to movies, conservatives can be just like liberals if a film pushes their buttons. This week I saw a former CIA official on TV praise Bridge of Spies as a “great movie” but then go on to ...
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Join the Spider-Man Resistance
The Marvel reboot Spider-Man: Homecoming is such a blatantly calculated example of pop-culture inoculation — it presents a teenage Peter Parker’s apprenticeship to the Avengers clan of superhero misfits — that, maybe, it warrants the same wariness as the vaccination controversy. ... -
In the Almost-Great Baby Driver, Hollywood Goes Asperger’s
Lots of movies are manipulative, but Edgar Wright’s action-comedy Baby Driver defines the era by pampering its teenage audience. Yet its most impressive moment invokes an obscure but cinematic icon: The hero nicknamed Baby (Ansel Elgort), an orphaned hipster ... -
The Mummy Unwrapped: American Guilt and Masochism
Tom Cruise is a product of the ’80s, the period when American movies gave up that mesmerizing 1970s spirit of self-examination and became fatally “high-concept.” Cruise’s recent string of action movies showcasing his bantam intrepidness have all been frenetically “... -
Baywatch’s Cultural Blindness
The new Baywatch movie, a reboot of the Nineties beach-set crime-and-melodrama TV series, continues Hollywood’s unoriginal marketing. It holds momentary interest for the way it adapts television culture (free, meaningless distraction) for a new era. On the big screen, ... -
A Laddish Hero Earns His Crown in King Arthur
Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword first looks like a video game, then it borrows from assorted action-adventure films – Gladiator, 300, Lord of the Rings – as if genre imitation was necessary to hold the audience’s interest ... -
Obit Gives Us an Inside Look at Inside Journalism. It’s Not Pretty.
A new documentary about the New York Times arrives at just the moment America’s newspaper of record presents itself as something that stands not for news but for power, partisanship, and elitism. It’s titled “Obit,” perhaps in a ... -
Davies’s Emily Dickinson Film Is a Fine and Furious Work of Art
Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius in Amherst, Mass., where she lived around the time of the ... -
Making Art or Making Hate?
Alec Baldwin takes the charm out of the animated film The Boss Baby. Doing the voice of the title character, a newborn infant whose insistent demands challenge the family life of his young parents, Baldwin plays to type: court jester ... -
Faithless Disney, Empty Malick
The classic 1946 French version of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) featured an opening epigraph that explained the concept behind director Jean Cocteau’s live-action fairy tale: “Children believe what we tell them. They have complete ... -
A True Elevator Story
New Yorkers are known for their rudeness even when the intent is progressive compassion. This morning when heading for a press-courtesy movie screening, I entered a Midtown office building elevator, following behind a short Latino-looking couple. The man pressed a ... -
Return of the Get-Whitey Movie
What was it, exactly, that the all-media screening audience at the new movie Get Out was cheering for when the black protagonist killed an entire family of white folks one by one? Get Out isn’t simply a revenge thriller; ... -
Perfume-Commercial Sex in the New Fifty Shades
In Fifty Shades Darker, the annual episode of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, the kind of frolicking we’d see in a perfume commercial demonstrates Hollywood’s dishonest combination of prurience and prudery. Career girl/call girl Anastasia (Dakota ... -
20th Century Women Is a Stale Feminist Diatribe
The best thing about Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is a title that immediately tells us two things: 1) Its sexual politics are dated, and 2) its story will focus on outmoded cultural ideals. This is the same erroneous basis of ... -
Crises and Faith and Filmmaking
Martin Scorsese’s Silence almost offers a perfect allegory for godlessness in the age of Gawker and BuzzFeed. Set in the 17th century, the film depicts Japan’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converts. It follows two young Portuguese Jesuits, ... -
The Twelfth Annual Better-Than List
It’s no accident that the very best movies of 2016 challenged the mainstream and were not from Hollywood. Too many American filmmakers have lost the ability to look at human experience without cheapening our responses to it. Our most urgent ... -
Patriots Day Rises to the Occasion
Peter Berg’s Patriots Day, about the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, combines action-movie flash with commemorative-movie solemnity. Surprisingly, the competing genres even each other out: Neither insultingly exploitative nor piously dignified, it is a nearly ideal example of pop-art historical ... -
Damien Chazelle Peddles Gimmicks. Huppert Reigns Supreme.
Why is La La Land so charmless yet so wildly overpraised? It is the work of 31-year-old Damien Chazelle, a movie buff turned director who has no knack for the popular culture he imitates and who is temperamentally distanced from ... -
Progressives Will Always Have Casablanca — Unfortunately
It’s more than coincidence that the Brad Pitt–Marion Cotillard World War II spy romance Allied starts out in Casablanca. The love story between Canadian airman Max Vatan (Pitt) and French resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) begins in French-occupied ... -
Controlling the Narrative
As a science-fiction film with political undertones, Arrival improves on the 2009 District 9, in which an alien orb also hovered above Earth and panicked civilization. Arrival is distinguished by its spiritual overtones, a hallmark of director Denis Villeneuve, who uses the ... -
Hollywood Players’ Inferno
In the era of movie franchises, none has been more offensive than Ron Howard’s series adapting novelist Dan Brown’s best-selling potboilers that began with The Da Vinci Code, continued with Angels and Demons, and now befouls the marketplace ... -
Female Victims, Male Abusers, Revenge of the Sisters in the Very Boring, Very Politically Correct Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train, last week’s top box-office film, is so thoroughly lousy that it augurs a horrible future for the American movie-going plebiscite. This woman’s revenge story (dramatized in triplicate, with Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, and ... -
Hollywood’s Slavery Franchise
Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation simply isn’t emotional or visionary enough to erase the impact and importance of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation. It takes more than chutzpah to make a great ... -
The 13th via the Un-talented Tenth
Would W. E. B. DuBois, the prophetic sociologist, author, and negro activist of the last century, approve of the instantly celebrated race documentary titled “The 13th”? Director Ava DuVernay’s nonfiction film interprets the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which officially ... -
Hollywood Running Mates
Actor Denzel Washington (born in 1954) and director Antoine Fuqua (born in 1966) belong to the generations excited by the Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. Their latest collaboration, The Magnificent Seven, a reboot of the 1960 Hollywood film, shows no sign that they ... -
American Psychic Wounds: Clint Eastwood’s Sully
In Clint Eastwood’s Sully, the title refers to more than just a man’s nickname; it’s a term for the disparagement and distrust that Americans now regularly inflict on each other. A movie about the emergency landing of ... -
The Obamas’ Romantic Moral Shift
Southside with You idealizes Chicago law-school graduate Michelle Robinson’s first date with Barack Hussein Obama — the couple that eventually became the 44th president of the United States and his First Lady. This virtuous rendezvous is less a convincing love ... -
Lost in Animation
The best moment in recent animated films was The Lego Movie song, “Everything Is Awesome!!” An uproarious satire on this consumer age’s feel-good propaganda, it also critiqued the forced progressivism that infects everything from Apple gadgets and Pixar movies ... -
Jason Bourne’s Tough Guy Politics
A resolute Matt Damon aiming a Heckler and Koch USP (universal self-loading pistol) in the advertising poster for Jason Bourne tells all you need to know about liberal hypocrisy. The movie itself tells less, given the filmmakers’ attempt to obfuscate ... -
Who We Aren't
‘That’s not who we are,” a familiar presidential entreaty, came to mind after watching Woody Allen’s Café Society and the new Ghostbusters. Each film offers a comical view of American types, but enjoyment may depend on whether one ... -
The Notorious BFG
Some Spielberg watchers, of whom I am one, have had cause for concern: Can the great populist filmmaker ever regain his popular touch? Ignore box-office receipts and consider what’s become of his once-unifying, art-advancing cultural expression. Spielberg’s collaboration ... -
Disney’s Fishy Doctrine
‘There are no walls in the ocean” goes the concluding moral of Finding Dory, the latest social message from what can be considered the Disney Doctrine. But what about nature’s great barrier reef, the one known as Taste? Disney’... -
Better the Despot You Know
This week’s New York opening of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The President (Corinth Films) premieres one of best Iranian movies yet seen. Its story of a despot (Mikheil Gomiashvili) caught in the midst of a revolution, who escapes his country’... -
Movie Manifestos Exposed
There’s little distance between X-Men: Apocalypse and the films of Chinese director Jia Zhangke. Although their audiences are different (juvenile thrill-seekers and art-movie devotees), the films appeal to the same grim taste for catastrophe. It is a symptom of ... -
TV Politics vs. Movie Art
George Clooney’s relentless effort to remake what he fantasizes as the politically forthright American films of the 1970s makes him both a bore and an easy target. It turns out that the movies Clooney prizes — Network, All the President’... -
Rain or Reign?
In the summer of 1984, most everyone I knew who went to the movies or attended pop concerts admitted to shedding a tear during Prince’s performance of the title ballad in Purple Rain. The song’s cryptic metaphor about salvation, ... -
Confirmation: High-Tech Sleazing
Who could have guessed that the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee’s Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings would set the tone for American political and television culture for years to come? Those hearings became an embarrassing nationally televised spectacle, foreshadowing the O. ... -
Miles Ahead and Miles Behind
Actor Don Cheadle, long involved in Hollywood’s prostitution of actors — especially black actors (cf. Steven Soderbergh’s egregious Ocean’s caper franchise and the abominable cable-TV series House of Lies) — outdistances his previous career with Miles Ahead. In this ... -
Escapist Sci-fi, Escapist Politics
Midnight Special is a political sci-fi film, but very distinct from Marvel Comics fantasies, speculations on a totalitarian future (The Matrix), or nature-gone-amuck nightmares (Jurassic Park), Writer-director Jeff Nichols first evokes recent American social traumas like the sieges at Waco (1993) ... -
Praying for Hollywood — and Ourselves
Terrence Malick’s newest film, Knight of Cups, screened the day after the disastrous Academy Awards ceremony, and the timing made it seem a godsend. Inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Malick depicts Hollywood director Rick (Christian Bale) ... -
Bonfires of the Verities
The new inspirational movie Eddie the Eagle may already be doomed. Its fact-based story of British ski jumper Michael “Eddie” Edwards, who overcame childhood physical handicaps to make a showing at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, hews so closely to familiar ... -
Michael Moore’s Chucklehead Itinerary
Billed as “A New Comedy,” Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next is ungenerous and condescending. Those unfunny characteristics typify propaganda just as they also describe the sorry state of contemporary political humor, which has declined in this millennium, and ... -
Heroism vs. Existentialism
With The Finest Hours, heroism returns to movies. True heroism — not the sentimental distortion of human duty and obligation that people in the news media exploit to prove their sensitive appreciation, but rather the individual exercise of principle and sacrifice ... -
Benghazi as Zombieland
Neither an exoneration of Hillary Clinton nor a clear explanation of the events of September 11, 2012, which left four Americans dead at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is something political ... -
The Eleventh Annual Better-Than List
In 2015 more movies were released than ever (an average of a dozen a week). And while many of them offended one’s sense of truth, beauty, and politics, mainstream media (both conservative and liberal) promoted them nonetheless — as if only ... -
Tarantino’s Macro-Aggressions
Quentin Tarantino pries open American ugliness in The Hateful Eight. His Civil War/Agatha Christie/John Ford omnibus western uses racial epithets with unbounded insensitivity. The film’s macro-aggressions surpass anything in movie history (outcussing even QT’s own vulgar ... -
The Obama Western
The Revenant, the new Leonardo DiCaprio western, bids to be also the last western. That once-quintessential Hollywood genre has lost its popularity to sci-fi and comic-book flicks that trendily dramatize social tensions — along with offering escape into perpetual adolescence. The ... -
Creed: All-American
Who could have imagined that Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 Rocky – the most shamelessly sentimental boxing movie of them all — would inspire a black-liberation saga like the new movie Creed? After all, Rocky gave post–Civil Rights America the great white hope ... -
Attitude Filmmaking
Jay Roach’s Trumbo is another example of how political self-righteousness can throw filmmakers off their game. Roach, the director of such trite fare as Meet the Fockers and the Austin Powers spoofs, takes on the story of Hollywood screenwriter ... -
Burnt: Reflections of Our Politics
If there were such a thing as movie stars any more, Bradley Cooper would be one. In this age of media celebrities, Cooper pursues his craft in roles that embody contemporary social tensions, most impressively as Chris Kyle in American ... -
The Dark Days of Spielberg
The dark, creepy murk of Steven Spielberg’s 2011 Lincoln also seeps into his new film, Bridge of Spies, an account of the 1957 exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union of captured espionage agents, the Russian Colonel Rudolph Abel ...