Selected Film Reviews: Drama A-L
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For a complete chronology of film reviews, visit the Publications page.

“Trump May Be a Grandiose Narcissist, but He’s No Match for the Lyndon Johnson of All the Way” (review of Jay Roach’s ALL THE WAY), Chicago Reader, May 25, 2016. “Cranston has nailed the oaken Texas drawl, which could dip into crude laughs or soar into high-minded rhetoric. He’s mastered the big, rangy body movements Johnson used to cajole and threaten people. But more important, he’s located the terrible need and gnawing insecurity that drove a hill-country schoolteacher to become the youngest, most effective Senate majority leader in history, and then vice president, and then president and self-proclaimed bringer of a Great Society.”

“A Novel Treat” (review of Joe Wright’s ATONEMENT), Chicago Reader, December 6, 2008. “The story’s first half, which maps the relations between a British family and its houseguests as a scandal unfolds over two days in 1935, loses a noticeable amount of {Ian] McEwen’s social detail and emotional insight; the second half, which picks up five years later in the midst of the Battle of Dunkirk, is often more focused and powerful on the screen than on the page. This points up the real difference between the two forms: the novelist’s best friend is a character at rest, while the filmmaker’s best friend is a character in action.”

“The Bad Lieutenant Gone Wild” (review of Werner Herzog’s BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS), Chicago Reader, November 19, 2009. “[Nicolas] Cage suggested moving the story from New York to New Orleans, an idea embraced by the producers for its substantial tax breaks and by [director Werner] Herzog for its artistic potency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The breakdown of order following the storm lends currency to the idea of a cop who can’t control himself, and Herzog revels in the city’s polyglot, premodern ambience.”

“Yes, Tony Curtis Could Act” (review of Richard Fleischer’s THE BOSTON STRANGLER), Chicago Reader, October 28, 2010. “Richard Zanuck, the 32-year-old production chief at 20th Century-Fox who greenlighted the film, dismissed Curtis out of hand when [director Richard] Fleischer suggested him for the role. The studio was looking at a wide range of actors—Warren Beatty, Beau Bridges, James Caan, Peter Falk, Peter Fonda, Martin Landau, Ryan O’Neal, Anthony Perkins, Robert Redford, George Segal—but at 42, Curtis was older than any of them and had been doing nothing but comedy for the past six years.”

“Teenage Noir” (review of Rian Johnson’s BRICK), Chicago Reader, April 7, 2006. First place, Best Arts Criticism, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, 2007. “Neither the choice of source material nor the idea of transplanting classic literature to a high school setting is particularly innovative, yet there’s no denying that Brick is weirdly expressive, often when it seems most artificial. … High school may not be a shadowy world of moral anarchy and ruthless power relationships, of clueless authorities and back-alley punishments, but it can sure feel that way when you’re there.“

“Brighton’s Just Right for a Murder, Mate” (review of Rowan Joffe’s BRIGHTON ROCK,” Chicago Reader, August 25, 2011. “[The screen adaptation’s] big statement consists of moving the action up to spring 1964, when Brighton was invaded by mods and rockers who proceeded to kick the hell out of each other at the pier. … Back in the 1930s, when [the novel] Brighton Rock first appeared, there was no such thing as youth culture, and even if there had been, [writer Graham] Greene probably wouldn’t have given it any sort of weight in Pinkie’s emotional life. The whole point of the character was his complete lack of connection with anyone or anything.”

“The Cross and the Crosshairs” (review of John Michael McDonagh’s CALVARY), Chicago Reader, August 14. 2014. “[The penitent] reveals that he was raped by his parish priest every other day for five years, and because the culprit has died, the man promises to murder [his confessor] in a week’s time as a perverse vengeance against God and the church. This premise of an innocent man taking other people’s sins upon himself turns Calvary into a transparent passion play even as it places the movie squarely in the 21st century; the cross shouldered by [the confessor] as he counts down the days to his execution consists, in no small part, of all the ecclesiastical crimes now tumbling out of the closet.”

“The Two Jacks” (review of George Hickenlooper’s CASINO JACK), Chicago Reader, December 30, 2010. “Both [Casino Jack and Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money] ask whether [lobbyist Jack] Abramoff was truly corrupt or just the scapegoat for a corrupt legislative culture. Yet Casino Jack arrives at a much tougher, and more conservative, vision of American democracy: we may be endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, but privilege is reserved for the most aggressive.”

“Sad as Hell” (review of Antonio Campos’ CHRISTINE), Chicago Reader, November 24, 2016. “The heart of the movie is [Rebecca] Hall’s incisive psychological portrait of the anguished young woman, who suffered from bipolar disorder and, to a lesser degree, professional stress and an arid personal life. [TV reporter Christine] Chubbuck may have turned her own death into a public spectacle, but Christine works best as a private story of someone terribly alone, isolated by sexual insecurity and using her broadcast personality as a social shield. No matter how much we might want to regard her as a symbol of her times, or ours, she is complex and irreducible.”

“Two Close for Comfort” (review of Michel Franco’s CHRONIC), Chicago Reader, October 6, 2016. “Since the advent of cinema, people have been drawn to the screen by the promise of intimacy: the facial close-up, an overwhelming experience for early movie audiences, allowed them far inside the personal space of a stranger. Mainstream movies tend to celebrate intimacy—that quiet moment with a child or lover that redeems the stress and strain of being an astronaut or a hostage negotiator. But intimacy can also be a terrible burden.”

“Priests Gone Wild” (review of Pablo Larrain’s THE CLUB), Chicago Reader, April 28, 2016. “Larraín has found a powerful metaphor for the Pinochet years. … The film takes place in the coastal village of La Boca, among a group of disgraced Catholic priests who’ve been sequestered in a house by the ocean to atone for their sins. … This setting allows Larraín to examine their several varieties of denial, even as the men’s little haven is increasingly threatened by a disturbed man intent on avenging his childhood sexual abuse. As in the national memory, the crimes of the past just won’t go away.”

“It’s Mao or Never” (review of Zhang Yimou’s COMING HOME), Chicago Reader, October 1, 2015. “[Zhang] was jeered in 2008 for agreeing to direct the spectacular opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. As the New York Times put it, critics saw Zhang “playing the role of favored court artist—a kind of Chinese Leni Riefenstahl, creating beautiful backdrops for iron-fisted rulers.” Steven Spielberg’s decision to drop out of the Olympic project was personally embarrassing to Zhang, whose ardent nationalism has always been more complicated than people understand. As he once noted, he’s preoccupied with the Chinese people, but his films are seen more abroad than at home.”

“Reach Out, Touch Somebody, and Die” (review of Steven Soderbergh’s CONTAGION), Chicago Reader, September 8, 2011. “Just as Alfred Hitchcock shocked viewers by killing off Janet Leigh in Psycho, the first person to kick the bucket in Contagion is the glamorous [Gwyneth] Paltrow. There’s even a close-up of her blueish, dead-eyed face as two autopsy surgeons saw off the top of her skull and fold the bloody flap of her scalp down over her forehead. “Oh my God!” exclaims one of them, inspecting her brain. (If I could look inside Gwyneth Paltrow’s head, I’d probably have the same reaction.)”

“An Army of One” (review of Ralph Fiennes’ CORIOLANUS), Chicago Reader, February 2, 2012. “If you think the 1 percent are bad now, check out Rome in the fifth century BC. ‘“‘You common cry of curs!‘”‘ the aristocratic Coriolanus of the Shakespeare play addresses the people of the city, ‘whose breath I hate / As reek o’th’rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air.‘ So much for noblesse oblige.”

“Couch Tomato” (review of David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD), Chicago Reader, December 15, 2011. “Had [Carl Jung’s affair with a patient] become public knowledge, it might have destroyed not only Jung’s professional reputation but the very practice of psychoanalysis, which dwelled on the most intimate matters and often caused the patient to transfer to his therapist emotion he once felt for someone in his past. The last thing the psychoanalytic movement needed was for polite society or the academic world to decide ‘the talking cure’ was some sort of sexual con.”

“The Sound of No Music” (review of Terence Davies’ THE DEEP BLUE SEA), Chicago Reader, March 29, 2012. “To watch The Deep Blue Sea is to be plunged into a past world completely foreign to our own, where a person really can be alone with his thoughts (for better or worse) and people have a much healthier relationship with music, using it to connect with each other rather than blot each other out.”

“Police Lives Flattered” (review of Jack Webb’s DRAGNET), Chicago Reader, August 24, 2017. “As producer, director, and star of Dragnet, [Jack] Webb struck a Faustian bargain with William H. Parker,[Los Angeles’] controversial chief of police, trading creative control of the show for access to department resources. The televised Dragnet, which ran from 1951 to 1959 and again from 1967 to 1970, would be praised for its authenticity even as it served as a powerful propaganda tool.”

“Portraits of Artists” (review of Peter Watkins’ EDVARD MUNCH and Jessica Yu’s In the Realms of the Unreal), Chicago Reader, January 21, 2005. “Watkins divides his narrative into two facets: a documentary voice-over in English that examines [painter Edvard] Munch in a calm, academic tone, and dramatic scenes in Norwegian with nonprofessional actors, who often stare mutely at the viewer like characters in Munch’s paintings. This weird dichotomy between sight and sound allows Watkins to observe Munch from without and within.”

“Good Ol’ Boys” (review of Liza Johnson’s ELVIS & NIXON), April 21, 2016. First Place, Best Film Criticism, circulation 45,000 and over, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, 2017. “The truth is that Nixon was a political master and Presley was his dupe. Their meeting had nothing to do with narcotics, or America’s youth, or communist infiltration of rock music, or anything else Presley had on his mind—it was all part of Nixon’s crafty southern strategy, a sort of triangulation on the issue of race that had won him the presidency in 1968 and would return him to office again in 1972.”

“The Book of Jobs” (review of Bent Hamer’s FACTOTUM), Chicago Reader, August 25, 2006. “A movie needs an arc, and the whole point of [Charles Bukowski’s source novel] is that blue-collar life moves in a mercilessly straight line toward the grave.”

“Love, War, and Lies” (review of Doug Limon’s FAIR GAME), Chicago Reader, November 4, 2010. “Eventually every story line in the movie comes down to a matter of trust—between the White House and the CIA, between citizens and their leaders, between husbands and wives.”

“The Young and the Breathless” (review of Jonathan Levine’s 50/50 and Gus Van Sant’s RESTLESS), Chicago Reader, September 29, 2011. “There’s nothing lovely about a young person dying of cancer—it’s an ugly, cruel, humbling thing to witness. Yet Hollywood never tires of beautiful, valiant souls tragically wasting away from the disease: Kate Winslet in Finding Neverland (2004), Campbell Scott in Dying Young (1991), Deborah Winger in Terms of Endearment (1983), Ali MacGraw in Love Story (1970), all the way back to Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939). Even before that, we had Camille (1936), with Greta Garbo glamorously succumbing to tuberculosis, and seven silent versions of the same story, taken from a novel by Alexander Dumas. Dying young—you’ll pardon the joke—never gets old.”

“That O’s Gotta Go” (review of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s FIFTY SHADES OF GREY), Chicago Reader, February 19, 2015. First Place, Best Arts Criticism, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, 2016. “Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie adaptation of E.L. James’s best-selling porn novel, screened for the press last week at Showplace ICON, in a room jammed with feverish women. But I wanted to see it again in IMAX, on a seven-story screen, because I was curious whether the movie could be blown up any bigger than it already has been. … You can stroll into Target now and buy the official Fifty Shades of Grey lubricant and Fifty Shades of Grey vibrator. The hype is getting bigger and bigger, the tension building up inside me, and oh God, I think I’m going to . . . Come now, you didn’t really think I was going to finish that sentence, did you?”

“A Rebel’s Rebel” (review of Gary Ross’ FREE STATE OF JONES), Chicago Reader, June 30, 2016. “[According to historian Victorian Bynum], the so-called Free State of Jones represented ‘an alternative Southern vision of the Civil War,’ and Ross runs with that idea, giving white southerners something the cinema rarely offers them: the chance to embrace their heritage while rejecting the Confederacy. The legend of the Knight Company is thrilling precisely because it hijacks some of the most romantic aspects of Confederate mythology: it’s a doomed rebellion against the larger doomed rebellion, a lost cause (of African-American equality) inside a larger lost cause (of southern independence).”

“A Criminal Reputation: George V. Higgins From Page to Screen” (review of Peter Yates’ THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE and Andrew Dominik’s KILLING THEM SOFTLY), Perisphere, May 11, 2025. “The true brilliance of Higgins’s crime writing lies in its perfect marriage of form and meaning. Nearly every chapter of The Friends of Eddie Coyle or Cogan’s Trade unfolds as a conversation between two men; by the end of the book you grasp that the business of crime requires people to keep their relationships private, and that the business of convicting them in court consists largely of detecting, exploiting, and ultimately exposing those relationships.”

“Repent and Be Forgiven” (review of Ron Howard’s FROST/NIXON), December 11, 2008. “As [screenwriter Peter] Morgan makes clear, Frost in 1977 was widely regarded as a showman, not a newsman; his interrogating Richard Nixon would be analogous to Conan O’Brien interrogating Dick Cheney. In the early sessions, which focused on Vietnam, China, and the USSR, Nixon ran circles around him. The standard legend is that Frost, humbled by this, became a real journalist: he buckled down, did his homework, and nailed Nixon on the Watergate scandal. Frost/Nixon offers a more complicated assessment: that Frost may have succeeded not in spite of his showmanship but because of it.”

“Fighting Lies With Fiction” (review of Paul Greengrass’ GREEN ZONE), Chicago Reader, March 18, 2010. “Recently I received a promotional copy of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s best-selling nonfiction book about the botched U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003 and ’04. When I first pulled it out of the envelope, though, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Matt Damon stared at me from the cover, clad in U.S. Army gear and ready for some serious ass-kicking. now a major motion picture, read the cover copy. from the director of the bourne supremacy & the bourne ultimatum . . . matt damon . . . GREEN ZONE. … the paperback reminds me of those old classroom scenes where a kid hides a comic book inside his textbook—except in this case it’s the textbook that’s hidden inside the comic.”

“Chronic Depression” (review of David Mackenzie’s HELL OR HIGH WATER), Chicago Reader, August 18. 2016. “Scottish director Mackenzie … has never shot a movie in the American heartland before, and like so many Europeans who come to the U.S., he’s transfixed by the vast, rugged spaces and the pull of the open highway. In the flat, arid country of west Texas the endless ribbons of concrete take on the force of destiny; the brothers are constantly hurtling toward their fate, and sometimes their fate is hurtling toward them from the other direction.”

“A Hidden Life: A Faith of Conviction and Action” (review of Terrence Malick’s A HIDDEN LIFE), Living Lutheran, January 9, 2020. “A Hidden Life tells the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who, called up to fight in World War II, refused on religious grounds to swear an oath to Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to death and followed his Catholic faith to the guillotine in August 1943. An ordinary man, Jägerstätter might easily have been swallowed up by history, as his attorney and the Nazi judge deciding his fate predict in the film. A Hidden Life asks whether a martyr’s sacrifice, like a tree falling in the forest, makes a sound if no one is there to hear it.”

“The Difference Between Smart and Wise” (review of Nicholas Hytner’s THE HISTORY BOYS), Chicago Reader, December 8, 2006. “[Mr. Hector’s high school English] class is less like school than an evening at the pub: when the boys aren’t listening to him recite poetry, they’re acting out scenes from old movies for him to identify, or singing Rodgers and Hart songs at the piano, or conversing with him in French as they act out a visit to a brothel. Hector endorses A.E. Housman’s line that ‘all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.’ More to the point, Hector understands that knowledge can have uses later in life that we might not anticipate.”

“Family Unfair” (review of Patrick Wang’s IN THE FAMILY), Chicago Reader, August 30, 2012. “Much has been written about the film’s social politics; it tells the story of a gay man in small-town Tennessee who loses his lover to a car accident and custody of their six-year-old son to the dead man’s sister. But what really lingered with me was how beautifully Wang captured the feel of middle-class life in the modern south. … Wang truly understands life in small-town Martin, Tennessee, where In the Family takes place, and his story of prejudice and injustice hits even harder for the fact that he finds so much good there as well.”

“The Ugly 80s” (review of Gregor Jordan’s THE INFORMERS), Chicago Reader, April 23, 2009. “Every story [in Bret Easton Ellis’ collection The Informers] opens abruptly in first person, and you have to spend a page or two in the narrator’s head before you can figure out who he is. The writing is terse and minimalistic and instead of dependent clauses and punctuation there are lots of conjunctions and the subject is usually some young, tan, bleach-blond teen hanging with his soulless friends by the pool and they’re smoking pot and maybe doing some blow and there’s some girl sunbathing topless and the teen stares at the blue water and someone says something about getting tickets for Oingo Boingo and the end of the world is nigh.”

“Not From Around Here: How Roger Corman Captured The Intruder” (review of Corman’s THE INTRUDER), Perisphere, September 12, 2025. “The wily exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman, best known at the time for his horror movies with Vincent Price, shot the film on location in southeast Missouri in July and August of 1961, carefully guarding some of the content from the locals he employed as extras. … The supreme irony of The Intruder is that in bringing the story to the screen, Corman resorted to the same sort of chicanery as his carpetbagging protagonist.”

“The Boys in the Bureau” (review of Clint Eastwood’s J. EDGAR), Chicago Reader, November 10, 2011. “People are sure to pat [screen writer Dustin Lance Black] and [director Clint] Eastwood on the back for having handled the subject so tastefully, which in practice means that they steer clear of the most absurd stories and treat Hoover’s love life with some measure of ambiguity, even as they invent all manner of private scenes to portray him as a severely repressed homosexual.”

“Little Man With a Gun in His Hand” (review of John G. Avildsen’s JOE), Perisphere, April 27, 2025. “[The movie’s] central relationship is a marriage of convenience between the [middle-class Bill Compton], who pulls in a handsome salary at a Manhattan advertising agency, and the titular Joe, a racist, sexist, jingoistic foundry worker with a long list of right-wing grievances: black people gaming the welfare system, liberals pushing a gay lifestyle, rich kids disrespecting their country. Sound familiar? Now that the Vietnam war has faded into a more distant memory, Joe seems less like a commentary than a prophecy, eerily presaging Donald Trump’s courtship of the radical right as he ascended to the presidency.”

“To Make a Short Story Long …” (review of Don Siegel’s THE KILLERS), Chicago Reader, July 30, 2015. “The very idea of building out [Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story ‘The Killers’] … was inimical to Hemingway’s concept of fiction. He likened a story or novel to the tip of an iceberg, and ‘The Killers’ was a particularly striking example of this. ‘That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote,’ he once revealed.”

“A Large Story Writ Small” (review of Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE), Chicago Reader, July 12, 2018. “After police apprehend them [living in a public park], father and daughter [Will and Tom] are processed through social services and set up with a more stable work and living arrangement, but Will is so alienated from modern life that he can’t function. Leave No Trace offers a stark commentary on homelessness and the terrible human cost of America’s wars. What makes it a great and moving film, though, is the extraordinary connection between Will and Tom, who are as quiet and direct with each other in their isolation as the forest is with them.”

“Lenny Bruce: Out of the Shit-House for Good” (review of Bob Fosse’s LENNY), Perisphere, January 25, 2025. “Bruce was a spellbinding vocal performer with a dramatist’s sense of dynamics. A jazz buff, he had a voice like a trumpet and loved to use it, yet he delivered some of his best punch lines in a hushed whisper. His pauses were masterful; even on recordings one can imagine him looking around the room as the tension builds, waiting to unleash the zinger. … At [his Carnegie Hall concert] one routine is interrupted by howling feedback from his stage microphone, but he uses it to conjure up an image of vampire bats hovering above the audience and waiting to strike.”

“The Years in Review” (review of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP), Chicago Reader, April 25, 2013. “The two-disc [DVD release from the Criterion Collection] includes plenty of extras, but the truly extraordinary element is a commentary track combining [Martin] Scorsese’s recollections with remarks that Powell recorded for a laserdisc release in the 80s. Like the movie itself, the commentary is a layered memory play and a poignant reminder that old age overtakes all of us.”

“Dishonest Abe” (review of Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN), Chicago Reader, November 8, 2012. “[Spielberg’s film] is unique among the major films about Lincoln, one that reveals not only his celebrated wit and wisdom but also his formidable skills as a politician. The man portrayed here possesses the gifts we should prize most in a president: he takes the long view of history but apprehends the present circumstance, and he has the iron will needed to reconcile the grimy business of governing with the highest ideals of the American experiment.”

“Who Did You Gas in the War, Daddy?” (review of Cate Shortland’s LORE and Chanoch Ze’evi’s Hitler’s Children), Chicago Reader, February 14, 2013. “Left to their own devices, the children [of a high-ranking Nazi officer captured by Allied forces] visit a food dispensary in [their German] village, where photos of the death camps are prominently posted; in one photo Lore thinks she sees the standing figure of her father in uniform, and when she brushes her hand against it she picks up some of the poster glue.”