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.

Mouth Almighty: I Am Ali, reviewed.

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Neil Leifer's iconic photograph captured the aftermath of the controversial "phantom punch" with which Ali felled Sonny Liston for the second and final time, in 1965. 

Muhammad Ali is already the subject of many, many fine books and films. The distinguishing feature of the new documentary I Am Ali, which I reviewed for NPR today, is that filmmaker Clare Lewins was given permission to use never-before-released private tapes that Ali made of his conversations with his daughters and close confidants for his own enjoyment.

As someone who has listened to all 537 episodes of This American Life, many of them more than once and some of them more than twice, and who has annoyed my parents, brother, friends, and girlfriends by recording lengthy interviews with them on various occasions, this approach strikes a chord with me. The recorded voice of someone speaking to one other person will always feel more intimate than a close-up photograph ever could – to me, at least.The excerpts Lewins uses mostly date from the late 70s, by which time Ali, having reached his mid-30s, had slowed down and was getting hit more than he ever had in his twenties. He also started to exhibit symptoms of the Parkinson’s syndrome with which he would finally be diagnosed in 1984.

With so much strong Ali scholarship in the world already, I Am Ali can muster only slight contributions to the canon, but it’s a well-made and inspiring tribute to The Greatest if you're looking for an all-in-one Ali doc. Like I said in my review, the best Ali documentaries have tended to zoom in on a single fight or era of his life. What I happened to learn from this one is how Ali came to pose as St. Sebastian for the April 1968 issue of Esquire. 

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Muhammad Ali had to get Elijah Muhammad's permission to "dress up" as a Christian for this photo shoot.

WaPo book review: Easy Street (The Hard Way)

My review of Ron Perlman's autobiography Easy Street (The Hard Way) is in the Arts/Style section of this Sunday's Washington Post. But you can read it now. 

Perlman's frequent deployment of the phrase, "Any muthafucka but this muthafucka!" really endeared him to me. I've always liked him as an actor, though. I watched Beauty and the Beast when I was a kid because I had a crush on Linda Hamilton stemming from The Terminator, of course.

Drive Harder, John Cusack

John Cusack and Thomas Jane are both slumming in the low-budget chase flick Drive Hard.

My review of Drive Hard, an ultra-low-budget Australian chase flick that is every bit as inspired as its name, is up today at The Dissolve. Come back to us, John Cusack.

All Men Are Not Created Equalizer

Nighthawks at the Diner: Denzel Washington & Chloe Moretz in The Equalizer.

"A man can be an artist at anything," Christopher Walken said in Man on Fire, speaking of Denzel Washington's burnt-out assassin character, Joyhn (!) Creasy. "Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece."

Ten years later, Washington is playing another regret-haunted killer who returns to the warpath when a young girl to whom he feels a protective attachment is hurt. But the regret-haunted killer he plays in The Equalizer is a more personable and approachable guy, one who drinks special tea instead of booze. Are you not entertained? My NPR review is here.

Risible Business: Believe Me, reviewed.

Alex Russell summons his best Young Tom Cruise in Believe Me. So does everyone else.

I reviewed cowriter/director Will Bakke's uneven phony-evangelicals comedy Believe Me for The Dissolve. 

Miss Sogyny by Any Other Name: No Good Deed, reviewed.

No Good Deed stars Idris Elba & Taraji P. Henson are also credited producers, so they should know better.

The thrice-delayed, not-screened-for-critics thriller No Good Deed opened at No. 1 this weekend. Box Office Mojo reports its audience was 60 percent female and 59 percent over age 30. I'm an over-30 straight white dude, so WTF do I know, but to me the film -- which was written by a white woman and directed by a white guy -- felt incredibly insulting to its target audience of black women. In my Village Voice review, I tried to unpack the cynical, unkind assumptions it makes about the primary demographic paying to see it. Without making the piece as much of a drag to read as the movie was to watch.

Cruel to Be Kind: The Homestretch, reviewed.

Roque (center), one of the three young Chicagoans profiled in The Homestretch, is a bad poster child for homeless youth.

Here's my review of the disappointing Kartemquin Films' documentary The Homestretch for The Dissolve. I made a boneheaded mistake in the version of this where I filed wherein I ascribed the phrase "cruel to kind" to Nick Lowe, not to Hamlet -- even though I'd already referenced Hamlet earlier in the review, and in fact, the other piece I filed the day I filed this one was a review of King Lear. Embarrassing. Editors sometimes save your neck.