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All Tracks Converge: A Review of The Lincoln Highway

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After a stint in a Nebraska prison over an accidental killing, Emmett Watson prepares to start fresh in California with his wide-eyed eight-year-old brother, Billy, for whom the world is a story. Their plans go south—or east, rather—when jail-mates Duchess and Woolly, an Artful Dodger and his simple-hearted friend, hijack the mission in more ways than one. The journey that unfolds is as hilarious as it is anxiety-inducing. The long-suffering Emmett and his earnest kid brother make for two poles of relative stability in a world that Duchess and Woolly—both…

Testosterone Tropes: A Review of F1: The Movie

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If the social media “manosphere” became incarnate as a movie, that movie would be F1. Not so much a story as a series of “manly” tropes stitched together by plot armor and neon-colored dental floss, this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flim-flam construction seems to have as its primary targets twenty-something meatheads and middle-aged male divorcees living out their glory days (or, more likely, their could-have-would-have days) in their imaginations. The protagonist is an empty shell, the supporting characters mostly plot devices, and the plot itself is so agonizingly familiar as to make…

Look Up: Why I Believe in Superman (2025)

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Superman (2025) is a fun and wholesome movie that’s best enjoyed on the big screen. Despite some issues with pacing and a few unfortunate content choices, actual comic book readers and fans of DC’s more fantastic feel will find James Gunn’s first entry in the new DCU a welcome escape from the grim-dark deconstructions of Zack Snyder and the sprawling fizzle of the recent MCU. What they will not find—contrary to certain online trolls with axes to grind—is a Superman who is either weak or “woke.”  Instead, Gunn offers us…

Escaping the Void: A Review of Thunderbolts*

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t done itself any favors since Endgame (2019). Between emasculating beloved male characters, inserting contemporary ideology at every turn, and generally sacrificing good storytelling on the altars of agenda, Disney has managed to turn a multi-billion-dollar franchise into a string of box office duds. Thanos with his gauntlet couldn’t have ruined things any more thoroughly than has Disney with its blinkered ideological commitments. But amidst the wreckage of the post-Snap MCU, the studio has managed to produce at least two decent films. One was Guardians of…

Living the Sermon: A Review of 42

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Jackie Robinson’s Story When Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey cooks up a plan to add a black man to the roster, he knows there will be pushback. “You break a law and get away with it,” says an advisor, “and some people will think you’re smart. You break an unwritten law; you’ll be an outcast.” “So be it,” says Rickey. The year is 1945, and the man for the job is Jackie Robinson. Starring the late Chadwick Boseman (of Marvel fame) and Harrison Ford, 42 chronicles Jackie’s rise and the…

Armageddon in Slow Motion

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Mankind will end in four hundred fifty years, and its opinions about that fact may be largely irrelevant. That is upshot of Cixin Liu’s Hugo-winning The Three-Body Problem, and its sequels, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. Together, they make for a complicated, high-concept meditation on humanity, politics, speculative science, and the problem of evil. Whether that meditation yields good fruit is another question. While the events in this trilogy involve multiple protagonists, include numerous plot twists, and span hundreds of years, this review will focus primarily on the first…

Terrible Purpose: Beauty and Contradiction at the Heart of Dune

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In Dune, Part One and Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has adapted the unadaptable. These two impressive films, though they simplify and sometimes alter their source material, manage to distill the heart and soul of Frank Herbert’s original novel (1965). Given the influence of the ideas embodied in the text and now popularized in the films, it seems a good moment to appraise these adaptations, and to reflect on the ideas they promote. Like the films, this essay is divided into two parts, the first being a traditional film review (of…

An Understated Masterpiece You’ve Probably Never Seen

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“They used to say that a child conceived in love has a greater chance of happiness. They don’t say that anymore.” So muses Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), whose status as a “God child” with a one percent chance of living past thirty ought to have prevented him from pursuing greatness. Set in a believable near-future where nearly every new human life has been planned down to the genes, Gattaca chronicles the early career of a man who refused to submit to that world’s predestinarian yolk. Gattaca’s star-studded cast and incredible…

Planning a Kingdom – A Review of King Richard

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“Don’t worry about what other people are thinking,” says Richard Williams to his daughters, future tennis phenoms Venus and Serena. “We are here getting great.” King Richard (2021) looks at the Williams sisters’ early years and makes a powerful argument that fathers shape the world, for good or for evil. While the entire cast turns in capable performances, Will Smith embodies the tenacious fatherhood of its titular character, a man whose passion, planning, and principles, as portrayed in the film, wrestled a dream into waking life. King Richard portrays Richard…

Ford vs. Ferrari: Manhood at the Crossroads

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“I had no idea!” says Henry Ford II, the calculating man, the money-general, weeping as he encounters—for the first time up-close—the sheer power of a metal wonder made by human hands. It’s a pivotal moment, yet James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari pulls a dozen of these maneuvers with all the cool madness of a Ken Miles or a Carroll Shelby. Mangold delivers a tightly-written and multi-layered study of two kinds of men: those who master metal monsters and those under the mastery of a different sort of beast. When the…