Book Review: "Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions — My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood"

My Washington Post review of prolific writer/director/producer/showrunner Ed Zwick’s name-dropping but also name-naming memoir is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Bullet Train"

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brad Pitt can’t just get along. (Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures)

Bullet Train, director David Leitch’s strangers-on-a-fast-train-fight thriller, is way less diverting and way more confusing than it oughta be. Letich and Chad Stahelski made John Wick together, and Stahelski stayed on for the subsequent Wicks while his old creative partner went off to make Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, the hilariously double-ampersand-packin’ Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and now Bullet Train. Stahelski is fairing better, I reckon. Anyway, it was fun to talk Bullet Train with Glen Weldon, Aisha Harris, and Mallory Yu.

The Stars My Destination: "AD ASTRA," reviewed.

Pitt as Major Adward J. Astra. No, his character is named Roy McBride. (Fox)

James Gray’s Ad Astra is a stirring, soulful space odyssey in the tradition of 2001, Sunshine, and Interstellar—but its real antecedent is Apocalypse Now. My NPR review is mes Gray’s Ad Astra is a stirring, plausible space odyssey in the tradition of 2001, Sunshine, and Interstellar—but its real antecedent is Apocalypse Now. My NPR review is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"

Brad and Leo, movie stars (Sony)

Our Pop Culture Happy Hour dissection of Quentin Tarantino's ninth picture gave me the opportunity to be on a panel with Monica Castillo, a fellow Eugene O'Neill National Critics Institute fellow and someone with whom I'd not previously had the pleasure of speaking, though we have friends and colleagues in common. A fun episode. After some deliberation, we elected to avoid any in-depth discussion of the ending of the film.

The Next-to-Last Picture Show: "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," reviewed.

Brad Pitt is a stuntman-turned-gopher to a fading TV star in Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. (Sony)

The Bruin—the Westwood cinema where Margot Robbie (as Sharon Tate) goes to see herself in the Dean Martin-starring spy spoof The Wrecking Crew midway through Quentin Tarantino's new Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood—is where I saw Ocean's 11 (the Soderbergh-Clooney-Pitt one, not the the Dean Martin one) in 2001 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. I must've seen at least a few other movies there, but those are the two I remember.

I like QT's new picture a whole lot. My NPR review awaits you.

We'll Always Have Casablanca: Allied, reviewed.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as glamorous spies in Allied. (Paramount)

Here's my review of Robert Zemeckis' high-tech-but-old-fashioned WWII espionage thriller Allied. It's meant to evoke a genre that includes great films like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious or Carol Reed's The Third Man. Or lesser Graham Greene works, like this one.

The Spoils of War: FURY, reviewed.

This is the scene that makes writer-director David Ayer's FURY something more than just a gritty combat picture.

Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Brad Pitt, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal as the crew of FURY, an M4 Sherman tank.

Logan Lerman is a green member of Brad Pitt's tank crew in David Ayer's FURY.

I expected that David Ayer, the writer of Training Day and the writer-director of End of Watch and Sabotage, would make a gritty World War II combat picture. But I was surprised how much an interest his film takes in the plight of women, and its willingness to show American soldiers behaving badly during the "Good War." My NPR review is here.