Movies starring Harry

I have done my best to avoid spoilers and, although I’d love to get into specifics about what’s wrong with the movie, such an approach would require revealing plot twists. So, although I won’t go that far, some of the “comparison” movies...

These days, everyone wants a multiverse movie – Marvel, DC, and now the guys who made Swiss Army Man. If nothing else, Everything Everywhere All at Once shows that it can be done without committing a nine-figure sum to the production budget. Tha...

Over the years since its March 1984 release, Alex Cox’s debut feature, Repo Man, has developed a reputation as a “cult classic.” Unlike many other films to claim that badge, this one deserves it. Largely dismissed by mainstream audiences dur...

A wonderful thing about Shakespeare’s canon is that those plays can form the vehicles by which any director’s unique vision can emerge. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh all recognized this. With The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel ...

I love the beginning – the sense of time and place. Part of this has to do with the introductory voiceover narration (provided by the writer of the novel, Donald Ray Pollock, whose intonation has all the right qualities for this job). Part o...

The concept of immortality isn’t new material for either comic books or science fiction/fantasy but the seriousness with which it is treated by The Old Guard is atypical. The movie, based on the graphic novel series by Greg Rucka & Leand...

Tolkien represents a classic standard-order biopic – a high-level profile of someone with minimal flesh on the bones. More like the dramatization of an Encyclopedia Britannica entry than a fully rendered movie, Tolkien provides details about ...

Watching The Wife, I was reminded of how movies used to be. Back in the 1990s, something like this would have been common: an engaging story anchored by two powerful performances. Glenn Close is as good as she has ever been (although I would p...

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, chaos only works in a movie when it is carefully controlled and focused. Tarantino is one of several masters of this technique and there’s a sense during the course of Gringo that director Nash Edgerton...

Although Dunkirk is technically a war film, its tone and style are those of a high-octane thriller. For his most serious-minded film to date, Christopher Nolan has employed all the weapons in his arsenal to craft something that, despite the O...