Film critic for Salt Lake City Weekly since 2000.
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A Thousand and One 2023
It took an embarrassingly long time for the significance of the title of writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s feature to become clear, but once it did, it snapped into focus everything the story was trying to say about it’s particular time and place. It opens in mid-1990s New York, where ex-convict Inez (Teyana Taylor) emerges from prison determined to be reunited with her 6-year-old son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who has been remanded to foster care. When she abducts him away from…
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Passages 2023
In hindsight, there’s something pitch-perfect about the fact that the movie Tomas (Franz Rogowski), the filmmaker anti-hero of co-writer/director Ira Sachs’ feature, is making at the outset is titled Passages, produced (like this movie) by SBS Productions; if nothing else, it’s a portrait of a kind of solipsism whereby you just assume everything must be all about your needs. The premise finds Thomas beginning an affair with a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos)—one that he has no problem immediately telling…
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The Lion King 2019
What if this Lion King had come first? It’s an interesting thought experiment, sort of a second-cousin to the idea that drives the current theatrical feature Yesterday: What if we woke up in a world where Disney had never released a hand-drawn animated film called The Lion King in 1994, and this story were appearing now for the first time, in the age of photorealistic CGI recreations of real-world animals? If there’s anything wrong with it—and by extension, with Disney’s…