American Sniper Movie Review

A Navy SEAL sniper sits on the roof of a building in Iraq. In the street below is an American military convoy. His job is to shepherd those soldiers to safety by keeping a lookout for potential threats. In the city war zone that has been evacuated, any military-age male must be regarded as a threat. First he scopes a man talking on a cell phone. The man steps inside, not knowing how close he came to losing his life. Next a woman and a boy, not more than eleven or twelve years old, arrive on the street. She hands the boy a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the other end of the soldier’s com can’t confirm visually. The call is entirely his. Men who engage in war are fair targets. What do you do about a child who is about to kill your comrades?

Classic Movie Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My memory of watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the first time was that it was long and good, but felt more like work than enjoyment. Fifteen years later my view is completely different. This is a masterful piece of filmmaking, a movie that plays with genre expectations and is humorous, violently playful, serious, and all-around entertaining. I’m not sure what didn’t strike me about it the first time.

Trouble with the Curve Movie Review

I have to give Clint Eastwood a lot of credit for his acting choices as he gets older. He has never shied away from playing his age, a rarity in a business that rewards youth and vigor. Roughly since Unforgiven he has continued to play characters whose age has some profound impact on the story. As Gus in Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood plays a baseball scout who faces irrelevancy by the new technologies and theories that have a way of creeping into the workplace.

J. Edgar Movie Review

Earlier this year I wrote a review of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter that complained of my weariness with his recent lazy filmmaking. I almost began this review of his latest film, J. Edgar, the same way until I went back and read that one. But the fact remains that his biopic of the man who was director of the old Bureau of Investigations and then first Director of the FBI for a total of 48 years is tired, boring and absurd. This is lazy storytelling at its worst.

J. Edgar Hoover always was and remains to this day something of an enigma. We know him as the paranoid director who supposedly investigated his enemies and people he believed to be subversives and radicals. He’s widely suspected of illegally wiretapping and of keeping secret files that were ultimately never recovered (at least in full). There is strong suspicion he was a deeply closeted homosexual and may have maintained a long-term relationship with his number two man Clyde Tolson. There’s even some silly speculation that he was a cross-dresser. But we don’t know much about the man and his motivations for his paranoia and his jealousy when it came to FBI agents who absorbed more of the spotlight than he could stand.

Gran Torino Movie Review: Growl and Scowl, Grrrrr

First published on American Madness on 19 December 2008.

Republished here with minor editorial adjustments that do not affect content.

The last few years have brought Clint Eastwood a great deal of critical success as a director. He’s recently had a four film streak beginning with Mystic River in 2003 that have brought three Best Picture Oscar nods, including a winner in Million Dollar Baby, and renewed praise for the aging movie star. This year Eastwood has given us another two films, each of which has the scent of awards season contenders, but ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of greatness that we may have unfairly come to expect from him.

Changeling, which opened in October, rides high mostly on the backs of the performances of Angelina Jolie and a refreshingly understated John Malkovich. Unfortunately the film, which tells the true story of a Los Angeles woman whose young son went missing in 1929, veers off into the wilderness of courtroom drama. It wears out its welcome after about ninety minutes of what could have been a taut drama, but instead becomes an outsized spectacle.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1986

It turns out April 1986 was a rather uneventful month at the cinema in the United States. The two biggest box office money earners were basically flops. First was Ridley Scott's Legend starring a pre-Top Gun Tom Cruise.

The second was the low-budget creature feature Critters starring Dee Wallace and a teenage Scott Grimes.




If we ignore a forgotten film from 1974 and a nearly forgotten horror flick called The Hand, Oliver Stone's first important directorial feature was released this month. Salvador stars James Woods as a journalist who travels to El Salvador to document the 1980 civil war and becomes entangled with both the guerrillas and the right-wing military.

Hereafter Movie Review: Eastwood the Director Plods Through the Afterlife

Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard have a touching moment.

I think maybe I’m growing weary of Clint Eastwood the director. Critics, like me, have been singing his praises since Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, but his recent output may cause me to reevaluate what I once thought were excellent movies (Unforgiven and A Perfect World remain untouchable, however). Like Woody Allen, he churns out movie after movie each year (sometimes two!) with gradually diminishing returns. Sure, there may be the occasional spark of something genuine or original, but mostly it feels like he’s on autopilot. His films are more often than not dripping with forced sentimentality, supported by musical scores (composed by Eastwood) that have become repetitive and seldom have any forward motion.

All of these criticisms are true of his latest film, Hereafter, which stars Matt Damon as George Lonegan, a psychic reader with the honest ability to make connections with the dead. He has given up his lucrative business in favor of a simpler life as a factory worker.