Right off the bat, The Last Samurai asks us to romanticize and reduce samurai culture as not a thousand-plus year-old profession and class in a medieval system of governance, but rather as an ideal impossible for American culture (either in the 19th century or implicitly today) to attain. The prologue’s …

Even Officer Alex Murphy’s last temptation is similar to Jesus Christ’s. It’s literally the same offer of restored humanity when Murphy, in the finale, reclaims who he is. Since he’s not actually the Son of God, Murphy gets to keep his renewed sense of self. Until the next movie when …

In Her the dynamic between Theodore and Samantha can generally be viewed as a metaphor about how addicted we’ve become to smartphones in less than a decade since the iPhone was introduced to the market. Whether it was a serious science fiction consideration about the influence of artificial intelligence on …

Revenge of the Sith notwithstanding, that heel turn may not be something audiences want to see, even if Timothée Chalamet‘s cheekbones are still gorgeous. Lynch tried to tiptoe around Paul’s terrible purpose in his own film, as well as his unmade sequel script, perhaps wisely. As discussed in my own …

Surviving the Game (1994) A year after John Woo made his U.S. debut with the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target, another movie about the homeless being hunted for sport by wealthy businessmen arrived at multiplexes. Both films were loosely inspired by Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” …

Thus in a real subversion of the film’s religious horror roots, Margaret discovers her paternal church fathers secretly raised and nurtured her with the intention of always seeing her impregnated by a familiar of the Devil, a demonic jackal who we learn was also Margaret’s father. In other words, because …

Cold Wallet There’s a reason Steven Soderbergh awarded this nasty little thriller grant money to finish its post-production: Cutter Hodierne’s Cold Wallet is an evocative slice of social satire and nightmare. At its essence, the story has an almost biblical heft when three Reddit lifers and lurkers (Raúl Castillo, Tony …

Yet while many of the same characters who made those jokes appear in Frozen Empire, more so than even 2021’s Amblin-adjacent Afterlife, Frozen Empire has drifted entirely toward being a kids’ movie. In fact, the only major character arc in the film is carried by the newest films’ best addition, …

There is a scene late in Dev Patel’s directorial debut, the ferocious and ferociously entertaining Monkey Man, where the filmmaker, star, and co-writer rips a guy’s throat out. In the realm of action cinema, that is of course nothing new. However, the way it occurs here is. When Patel’s Kid …

Ellie is of steelier stuff. She simply wants to document the fall of an empire with the same detached gaze she perfected while lensing sectarian and imperial violence in the Middle East and Africa. She does, however, maintain enough of her soul to wince when Joel lets a cub photographer, …

Nonetheless, the emails were exchanged on Sept. 2, 2022, weeks before principal photography started on Oct. 24, 2022, and about 10 pages of the script were reportedly trimmed. This reportedly toned down elements from the movie’s nonfiction source material. But inherently Priscilla is incapable of being blatantly unfair to Elvis, …

Paul thus finds himself quickly going native, but only insofar as it brings him several steps closer to leading these people against House Harkonnen’s vile Baron (Stellan Skarsgård), and even the Imperium’s Emperor (Christopher Walken), who secretly condoned the murder of Paul’s father. But each move toward revenge Paul makes, …