Film Editor, Slant Magazine
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Jurassic World Dominion 2022
Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion is instantly doomed by setting itself four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. With humans and dinosaurs having grown accustomed to living alongside each other, coming face to face with a velociraptor no longer seems to send the same shiver of fear down people’s spines. It should, however, still send one down our spines, but Trevorrow stages his new film’s too-few dino-a-mano skirmishes with an impersonality that never inspires awe, only further…
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Firebird 2021
Oleg Zagorodnii and Tom Prior have faces that could launch a thousand ships. The erudite lovers that the actors play in Firebird might appreciate that allusion, but from the evidence on display throughout this drama, you don’t doubt that director Peeter Rebane would deem it too indirect for his purposes. This is a film, after all, where Roman (Zagorodnii) and Sergey (Prior), some five years after they first ended their clandestine love affair, reunite in Moscow and Sergey bitterly airs…
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Whiplash 2014
"Exhilarating," "astounding," and "electrifying" reads the quotes on the film's poster, from agents of our culture of mean. Okay, I'll give it "electrifying." Miles Teller is a mean drummer, or maybe it's the jazzy cutting that tricks one into thinking so, but the implausible scenario is pretty low-down in how it tries to milk suspense from an unbridled spectacle of human cruelty. Not even sure Damien Chazelle believes his paltry justification for J.K. Simmons's worse-than-Gordon-Ramsay shtick. Maybe someone needs to throw a director's chair at his head so we can see if he's capable of drumming up a "Casablanca."
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Timbuktu 2014
Do not miss this great film when it comes to a theater at a major metropolis near you at the end of the month. It has its imperfections, but they pale in significance to its elegiac sense of will. After what happened yesterday in Paris, and especially for those confused about the ties between Islam and terrorism or operating under the mistaken belief that Charlie Hebdo's provocations weren't necessary, the film's searing, lucid depiction of innocents rightfully, righteously fighting fundamentalism from within will grip you in horrified empathy.
