Update: This is my first review to receive 100+ likes, so I’m pinning it to my profile as a representative example of my writing. 

A Chorus Line became the most successful Broadway musical (up to that time) and helped revitalize Manhattan’s Theater District by, ironically, exposing the near-collapsed state of the Broadway musical. A confluence of cultural and economic factors — the decline of NYC itself, the emergence of the concept musical, shifts in public taste (which also affected movie musicals…

Although entertaining, this follow-up to writer-director Rian Johnson's Knives Out strikes me as decidedly inferior to that excellent mystery film. Southern-fried sleuth Daniel Craig returns, this time to help Janelle Monáe learn who's responsible for her twin sister's putative suicide. The investigation takes them to the private island of tech bro Edward Norton, who's hosting his powerful protégés for a weekend of locked-room mystery games: Governor (and Senate-hopeful) Kathryn Hahn, scientist Leslie Odom Jr., fashionista Kate Hudson, and manosphere personality…

This clever homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (GADF), as well as to the all-star adaptations of some of that fiction in the 1970s and ‘80s, works because writer-director Rian Johnson understands its pleasures: the archetypal stock characters and the “plotting” of the mystery, in every sense of the word. Johnson modernizes the setting, which enables him to comment on class, race, and gender dynamics in ways that are relevant to 21st-century audiences. But he also grasps the…

Sometimes, after a long day of work, you just want to put on a comfortable, familiar t-shirt and pair of sweatpants and relax. This masterpiece of silliness is the cinematic equivalent of such a sartorial choice. I vividly remember stumbling across this for the first time with one of my brothers not long after our dad started paying for premium cable channels in the mid- to late-1980s. Neither of us knew quite what to make of it at first, but…

“At the other end of the scale, we are honored to have with us a revolutionary of different caliber. […] He has survived intact.”

When my brother visited me recently, I learned he’d never seen any episodes of The Prisoner. Well, that needed to be changed, and he got hooked after we watched the first two. I decided to finish rewatching the entire series after he left, and I managed to screen the last two episodes on what would have…