16 reviews in this category.
Scorsese's black-and-white masterpiece is at once a devastating critique of male violence and a deeply Catholic meditation on sin and suffering. It arrives at progressive conclusions through traditional moral language. A difficult but essential film.…...
Forty-two years later, The Karate Kid still works. It works for the same reason it worked in 1984: because it believes in something, and it has the craft to make you believe it too....
Rudy does not have a twist. It does not have irony. It does not subvert your expectations. It does exactly what it says it is going to do, and it makes you cry anyway. That is not a trick. That is craft....
There's a version of Kurt Warner's story that gets made as a gritty prestige drama. Dark photography, ambivalent faith, a marriage under strain, the question hanging over everything about what all this suffering was for.…...
Ryan Coogler took one of Hollywood's most sacred franchises and made it matter again. That should have been impossible.…...
There are very few films that score STRONGLY TRADITIONAL on the VVWS scale and deserve it as completely as The Boys in the Boat....
Twenty-nine years is a long time between sequels. Most of those films fail because the audience has grown up and the comedy has not.…...
Happy Gilmore is thirty years old and it still makes people laugh. That is not nothing. Most comedies from the mid-nineties feel like archaeology.…...
The Iron Claw is a haunting film about the Von Erich wrestling dynasty and the way family legacy and cultural values can become weapons.…...
Miracle has the easiest setup in sports film history. You already know the ending. The 1980 US Olympic hockey team beating the Soviet Union is one of the most famous moments in American sports, in American history. The miracle is not a spoiler.…...
If you want to explain to someone what a traditional sports film looks like, you show them Hoosiers. That's it. Discussion over....
Rocky is 50 years old and it still works. That's not a small thing. Most films that win Best Picture feel like artifacts within a decade. Rocky feels like it was made last year. The reason is simple: it's about something real....
Remember the Titans scores traditional lean, and if that surprises you, let me explain the math....
Ford v Ferrari is the kind of film that Hollywood used to make regularly and almost never makes anymore.…...
Air is the kind of movie that shouldn't work and completely does. A 112-minute film about a sneaker deal. No action, no explosions, no love story to speak of. Just a group of men in bad 1980s clothes arguing about basketball shoes in conference rooms.…...
Creed III is the best pure sports drama since Rocky II and the most traditional-values-aligned major film of 2023. It is also Michael B.…...
