Film Review: “The French Dispatch”

Anderson’s French Dispatch is precious and pretty, with an emotional punch

The French Dispatch
(From L-R): Tilda Swinton, Lois Smith, Adrien Brody, Henry Winkler and Bob Balaban in the film THE FRENCH DISPATCH. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

Fox Searchlight has finally released Wes Anderson’s very long-awaited new film The French Dispatch, and this sentence pretty much sums it up: “Leutenant Nescaffier is emphatically celebrated among cooks, cops and capitaines, not to mention swindlers, stoolies and snitches, as the great exemplar of police cooking.”

If that sentence – with its very sneaky verb, its obviously overbalanced serial commas, its all too visible use of French terms, and finally, its curious “police cooking”- makes you smile, laugh, giggle, catch your breath, or even tingle, then this is your film. If not, then there’s nothing I, or this review, can do for you.

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Film Review: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

Border drama sequel lacks depth, insight 

Covert operative Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) and CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) discuss strategy.

The makers of Sicario: Day of the Soldado probably couldn’t have predicted just how relevant their film would be today back when it was greenlit to follow its 2015 precursor Sicario. But those hoping for a searing dramatization of the inner workings of the U.S./Mexico border patrol and its operators will be sorely disappointed with this sequel, which offers plenty of gore and violence, but little in the way of prescient or urgent social commentary.

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Film Review: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Ninth installment sticks to the script

A rebel X-Wing doesn't know when to call it a day
A rebel X-Wing doesn’t know when to call it a day.

“Every once in awhile I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie,” wrote a rapturous Roger Ebert in the summer of 1977 of Star Wars. Later that year a more skeptical Pauline Kael, writing about the same film, said, “the loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head.” Never could the duality of responses to the Star Wars series of films be better predicted. They are either the greatest experiences in a movie theater since L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, or the biggest waste of time since Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Continue reading “Film Review: Star Wars: The Last Jedi