Jeffrey Wright – Spinning Platters

Film Review: “American Fiction”

American Fiction is a blisteringly humorous and observant debut

Cord Jefferson has been a writer on a few of the most celebrated television shows of the last six years, including Master of None, The Good Place, Watchmen, and Station Eleven. Transitioning to films, he makes his writing and directing debut with American Fiction. Jefferson focuses all his storytelling wit on creating a prescient satire, and as a result, American Fiction becomes not only a powerful introductory statement for the filmmaker but also one of the year’s finest cinematic works.

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Film Review: “Asteroid City”

Wes Anderson’s latest is a multi-layered delight

I’d like to kick off this review with a question: what makes a Wes Anderson film the “most” Wes Anderson? Perhaps, objectively speaking, any Wes Anderson film, upon its release, is the “most” Wes Anderson, since that’s the project he’s put his latest ideas, artistry, and effort into. The unfairly subjective angle of this ranking, however, would require prioritizing Wes Anderson’s trademarks: the color palette, the quirkiness, the unique characters, and the cast size. Asteroid City, Anderson’s eleventh feature film as director, is, without a doubt, the “most”…. nah, I’m just kidding. Asteroid City represents a maturation in many respects, utilizing a multi-layered framing device to tell an oddball story about artistry, but with an emotional underbelly.

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Film Review: “The French Dispatch”

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

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: The Goldfinch

Acting, cinematography are highlights of imperfect adaptation of Tartt’s famed novel

Cinematographer Roger Deakins captures the desert at dusk as Las Vegas transplants Theo (Oakes Fegley, l.) and Boris (Finn Wolfhard) become friends.

As a film critic, I try to ignore early buzz on films I’m going to review so I can form my own unbiased opinion when I see the picture. But this month, it was hard to ignore the vitriol that poured on to social media after The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto Film Festival; hate for the movie was prolific and fierce. So, naturally, going into Monday’s reviewer screening, I was apprehensive: could the picture really be as bad as all that!? I’m here to tell you that, thankfully, it is not. Is it the year’s best film? Far from it, but it’s not nearly as awful as Twitter would have you believe. If you’re a cinema fan — and/or a fan of Donna Tartt’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning novel on which the film is based — you will find enough here to keep you interested.

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