My latest essay for FilmFisher, where I dive in to the tragic complexities of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. While this isn’t necessarily my favorite bit of writing that I’ve done, it’s certainly the one that caused the most hours of internal wrestling beforehand. What I came out with in the end is this: that Jesse James is a revisionist revisionist Western — in that, hidden under the guise of genre deconstruction, this film actually…

(Extended Edition)

Scrapes the absolute bare minimum of just how mediocre it can possibly be with over two hours of dreary, feather-light action lacking heft or clarity or coherence to anything that resembles logic. Orcs, giant bats and war pigs don’t occupy our world or Middle-Earth’s, for combatants of real, solid humans never seem to exist in the same space and the laws of physics are defied enough to give Isaac Newton an aneurism. That being said, there’s enough good…