The Queen’s Gambit is a delightful indulgence into a downright mess of behaviors that are toxic in everyday life for a power fantasy aimed right at our self-destructive “dgaf”s like a Scorsese that stops halfway through. The fairy tale approach masks, justifies, makes spectacle, and mostly steamrolls over all of Harmon’s lackings and entitlements, with the unironic light at the end of the tunnel being her/our fulfilled fantasy of greatness and genius and fulfilled ambitions that, with the power of…

Not the evolutionary heir to Chaplin that we expected, or deserved, or needed. But possibly the one (at least for us blue & blue-leaning folks) that we... wanted. How the film seamlessly weaves and marries current events and real people - even if docufictional at points - into a narrative is brilliant. How the main villain, of sorts, and the culmination of the film is Rudy Giuliani, makes this feel way too damned real while also making this country look like…

The hell is this. Experiencing Marty is to watch overly-talky old-school Hollywood screwball kitsch occasionally hijacked by Ingmar Bergman. It's Saturday Night Fever sans the dancing and music, with the existential torment cranked up to 11. A film portraying old Italian widows yapping about chicken in heavy accents shouldn't also feature a chubby Ernest Borgnine sharing depressing thoughts of suicide. A cast with wise-crackin' New Yorker youths in suits shouldn't also sport a female lead whose performance and demeanor are…

Eyes Wide Shut is another severely misunderstood film by Kubrick, whose attention to detail and ability to enrich his film's content should be taken into consideration whenever watching his work. I haven't read the book that this film is based on, but, truth be told, any Kubrick fan would know that his films greatly deviate from their literary source. One of the late director's greatest strengths was taking a simple framework of a story and making it into his own,…