“I Don’t Understand the Play” — Josh Reviews Asteroid City
Asteroid City is the latest wonderful film from Wes Anderson. (Mr. Anderson wrote and directed the film; the story is credited to Mr. Anderson and Roman Coppola.) The film is set in a stylized version of the 1950’s, in a little town in the middle of nowhere called Asteroid C
Josh Reviews Poker Face Season One!
Natasha Lyonne stars in Poker Face as Charlie, a young woman with the unerring ability to tell when someone is lying. On the run from a powerful casino owner with a grudge, she tries to disappear into America. But she winds up getting herself continually involved in a variety of dan
Josh Reviews See How They Run
Set in London in 1953, See How They Run tells the story of a murder that rocks the production of the Agatha Christie murder mystery play The Mousetrap. Grizzled Scotland Yard Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and the young, eager Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are tasked with in
Josh Reviews Blonde
Blonde was written and directed by Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s a fictionalized retelling of the story of Marilyn Monroe. Ana de Armas stars as Marilyn. We follow her from her childhood with a mentally unstable mother through her meteoric
Revisiting Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights
After rewatching Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and Avalon (1990), I couldn’t resist moving on to rewatch Mr. Levinson’s 1999 film Liberty Heights. Written and directed by Mr. Levinson, Liberty Heights is another semi-autobiographical look back at his youth in Balti
Josh Reviews The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch, is a salute to a very specific (and mostly vanished) type of journalism: the heyday of The New Yorker magazine and its writers. The film itself is an anthology of several vignettes, beautifully structured to resemble the differe
Josh Reviews The Grand Budapest Hotel
Ever since seeing The Royal Tenenbaums in theatres and being absolutely blown away, I’ve been a big fan of Wes Anderson. Over the last few years, the filmmaker has been on a particularly special, can’t-do-any-wrong winning streak. I thought Fantastic Mr. Fox was his st
Catching Up on 2011: Midnight in Paris
At this point in Woody Allen’s amazing career (and whether you love or loathe the filmmaker himself, you must acknowedge that the man’s writing and directing a film a year for the last forty-some odd years is an amazing achievement) I think that my level of enjoyment of hi
Days of Terrence Malick (Part 1): The Thin Red Line (1998)
Terrence Malick directed two highly acclaimed films in the 1970’s (Badlands and Days of Heaven, neither of which I’ve seen, but I plan to remedy that soon — more on this later), and then he dropped out of sight for twenty years. Mr. Malick finally returned to the w