Miracle on 34th Street

Pulling on the whiskers of a man who insists he is the real Santa Claus can go a long way in convincing a dubious youngster that he's telling the truth. So marks one of the most famous scenes in Christmas movies, one that almost always ends up in montages of holiday films. Who could blame them for putting...

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Wolf

Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. Adult wolves have 42 teeth. They prefer to eat large mammals like deer and moose. They can weigh up to 175 pounds.All of these trivial facts are more interesting than most of what we get in the 1994 romantic horror flick Wolf, the Mike Nichols-directed...

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The Many Saints of Newark

This review contains minor spoilers."Your mama always said you'd be the chosen one."Fourteen years after the iconic HBO show The Sopranos ended its seven-year run as a critical and audience hit, fans' patience has been rewarded with a prequel titled The Many Saints of Newark. It may not exactly be what...

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I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo)

It may come as a surprise to many U.S. viewers of the new film titled I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo), but Mexico has a longer history of LGBT rights than the U.S. does, according to research by Caroline Beer and Victor Cruz Aceves. Despite the U.S. having a more powerful LGBT rights...

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Drunk Bus

In the beginning of Drunk Bus, a film "inspired by real shit," the audience is notified that the story takes place in 2006 (winter, based on the omnipresent snow and winter coats), which was noteworthy for me because I would have been a university freshman or sophomore in the winter of 2006. I also...

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Charade

 "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." So said Cary Grant, Hollywood's amiable king of charisma. Alas, he never got his wish, but one can certainly imagine that a second pairing would have been just as rewarding as the first. The two stars were paired as the leads...

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My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To

In My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To, directed by Jonathan Cuartas, two siblings (Patrick Fugit as Dwight and Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jessie) struggle to make ends meet while caring for their ill brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Jessie works as a waitress in town, while Dwight doesn't seem to...

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Riders of Justice

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven "Denmark is a pretty good place to live but it is by no stretch of the imagination the utopia many in politics and the media in the U.S. claim to be." That's how British author and journalist Michael Booth put it in an interview with The Washington Post a few years ago...

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The Paper Tigers

"Don't you people know how to park?" This racist attack towards an Asian-American man named Danny, played in The Paper Tigers by Alain Uy, represents a painfully common act of racism against Asians and Asian-Americans, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Audience members, when seeing...

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The 39 Steps

The films Alfred Hitchcock directed can probably be split up into five (more or less) distinct stages: The first is his films that only the most die-hard Hitchcock enthusiasts and film historians are aware of. The period is from 1923 (with the first film he directed, the silent short Always Tell Your...

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Some Kind of Heaven

If I am about thirty-four and a half years old, that means that I have roughly been on this Earth for 413 months. Of those 413 months, twelve of them have been spent visiting and even at times living in The Villages. The Villages is the largest retirement community in the country, with well over a hundred...

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Slalom

I admit to having no idea what the word "slalom" meant before a simple online search took me to a basic definition: to zigzag between obstacles. It is a fitting title for the debut feature film of writer and director Charlène Favier, a drama about a 15-year-old ski prodigy and her strict, predatory...

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Bigge: I Got a Story to Tell (And a List of the Greatest Notorious B.I.G. Songs)

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell is a new documentary on Netflix about Christopher Wallace (better known to all as Biggie, Biggie Smalls, and the Notorious B.I.G.) that in roughly ninety minutes will tell us "what rap planet this guy came from." That's fundamentally sort of the problem with the film. It's...

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All 56 2021 Oscar Nominees, Ranked

There have been more than enough articles by now about what an unusual year 2020 was. The pandemic, the injustice, the chaos, the fires, the violence. It was a year to remember, one in which society will hopefully learn from as we move forward. (I think we're all still not sure if 2021 is that much...

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