The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C I should probably just get this out of the way: I don’t like musicals. I especially don’t like dramatic musicals because I just can’t take a big dramatic moment seriously when people are breaking into song and dance. In West Side Story, I can’t feel the tension of an impending […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F I want to begin by quoting what is now my all-time favorite Rotten Tomatoes blurb. This gem comes to us from a positive review of The French Dispatch published by New City Film, a Chicago-based film criticism site: “An encomium to incunabula and marginalia and compulsive sketching and drenching details,.. […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D It sucks to watch your heroes get old. Whether it’s watching a legendary ballplayer tip his cap for the last time or watching an iconic band take the stage to the realization that they are now the old men that they once rebelled against, there is nothing that makes one […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: A- Benedict Cumberbatch takes a break from the wizarding world of Marvel and returns to The Imitation Game territory with The Courier, a true story about unsung heroes in a war effort (or Cold War effort, in this case). As both an espionage thriller and a historical drama, The Courier is a […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C- I don’t know what the fuck this movie is or who it was made for. Hipsters, maybe, I don’t know. On the surface, French Exit seems like another entry in one of my least favorite genres: award-grabbing dramas with little plot about characters that amount to nothing but an odd collection […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C Let’s just get this out of the way: this movie isn’t for me. My knowledge mainly lies with horror, action and exploitation movies, so a British melodrama about a gay couple struggling with dementia isn’t exactly my cup of tea. But the combination of awards season and the pandemic means that […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D I knew that I was in trouble when Nomadland opened with the proclamation that it won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival. For the unaware, the Venice Film Festival is a place for pretentious asshats to pretend to like boring movies in order to impress […]
I love certain kinds of westerns, usually ones starring Clint Eastwood and/or directed by an Italian because you can always rely on the Italians to transform a mundane genre into an orgy of graphic violence. Unfortunately, News of the World does not come from that school of western thought. No, News of the World comes […]
I don’t know much about Martin McDonagh (the writer/director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), but I bet that he is a really, really big fan of Fargo. In terms of plot, this film doesn’t specifically have many similarities to Fargo, but it does try to emulate the tone and themes of that […]
The trailers for Promising Young Woman promised a rape-revenge film and I figured that could go one of two ways. It could be an artsy feminist film or it could go the route of gritty exploitation, along the lines of something like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45. If you’re familiar with […]