Features
Dumbo (1941): The First Disney Film to Fall Short
Beautiful animation complements a pretty bare story about proving yourself even when you have nothing to prove. Not the studio’s best.
Dark City: Solving the Us Illusion
An extravagant mystery, deeply brilliant. Where mainstream meets noir and makes them both seem like a good idea.
Snow White and #MeToo: Reclaiming a Classic
An alternative to the modern rejection of fairytales. Why true love never goes out of style.
Enemy Explained
An analysis of Villeneuve’s dreamy horror film. Not for the faint, the arachnophobic, or the easily confused.
In Defense of Star Wars—The Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace is unformed as a child’s drawing, and sometimes feels as innocent, and many times threatens through sheer force of will to be charming.
Annihilation: Smart Movies Have it Rough
Annihilation isn’t essentially different from those old B-movies with rubber monsters and blank-eyed scientist waifs and big, calculating ideas about teaching us something about the universe. It’s just the movie those movies hope to be when they grow up.
Aliens: Diversity Done Right
Cinema’s strongest action lady brings us the most charming gore-fest ever made.
The Fight to Be Fathered: False Politics in Black Panther
This is a film made with the intention of proving that black actors should not be typecast as thugs, yet part of its comedic scheme is the counter-marginalization that all white people are colonizers. Black Panther admirably opposes prejudice when it’s directed at certain groups, but I would have preferred it, especially if its goal was “elevation,” to oppose all prejudice equally.
Ghostbusters (2016): The Problem with Fake Feminism
Merely a below-average comedy that becomes a disreputable slog by whoring out its cast for a studio’s ill-conceived marketing angle.
The Fault in Our Selves: Peter Rabbit and the Innocence Problem
Art isn’t just a product: it’s a testament to the beliefs that made it. What beliefs does Peter Rabbit celebrate? A belief in art or analytics, in magic or in marketing? I remember thinking the same of Kangaroo Jack, of which Peter Rabbit is more a successor than to Potter. At least it’s so disparate from itself that it says nothing about her and everything about us.