Recent Reviews

The Queen
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: If you’re looking for a Disney theme park ride, rent Dead Man’s Chest again; but if you’re looking for a thoughtful and brilliantly written, performed, and directed commentary on why we find Johnny Depp and Kiera Knightly so fascinating—and what the cost of that fascination can be—then this is the movie for you.

Flags of Our Fathers
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: It just so happens that the jackass writing this review is very sympathetic to what Eastwood’s film has to say, particular given my indoctrination at the hands of The Outsider. Right away, Flags’ script affirms that heroes and villains are “not what we think they are,” and Eastwood unfolds the action in such a way that we see the sense in that statement.

Barry Pepper
Greg interviews at Hollywood Jesus: You realize that in releasing a film like that, being part of a film like that, you have to answer to a lot of questions, and there’s a lot veterans that want to talk about it. It releases a lot of dialogue for people—emotions, maybe even closure for a lot of veterans. So you realize, wow, I’m a part of something a lot bigger than just playing soldier.

Marie Antoinette
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: Waste is not Coppola’s point. Instead, she illustrates that Marie Antoinette’s lifestyle was as natural to her—and no more excessive—than a sheep’s luxuriant meal of wildflowers, or a bumblebee’s wallow in a blossom’s pollen. Do we criticize a lamb for being a lamb, or a bee for being a bee?

Infamous
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: Good intentions and partial successes don’t add up to a satisfying whole. The film’s own fascination with celebrity disqualifies it from any meaningful commentary on the way in which Capote both publicly and privately traded on name recognition and glamour.

Man of the Year
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: Levinson’s misstep, if one can call it that, is in taking his politics so seriously. He desperately wants to question the Red-State / Blue-State talking-head cable-news nonsense that has gripped the country. And, in my humble opinion, he’s right to. He’s just not comfortable, apparently, in turning loose Williams to make the point through comedy.

The Last King of Scotland
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: As Garrigan, McAvoy shines as brightly as Whitaker. In fact, it’s hard to find anything resembling a run-of-the-mill performance in this film. What we do find, however, aside from Whitaker’s Amin, are characters who are either difficult to take seriously or who function purely as symbols.

My Country, My Country
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: My Country, My Country is a refreshing and compelling throwback to old-fashioned documentary filmmaking, an approach in which the filmmaker documents but does not (for the most part) participate, and whose filmed and edited sequences provide all the commentary, irony, and insight we need to interpret events.

Facing the Giants
Greg reviews at Hollywood Jesus: While I’m very open-minded about independent films that typically open on the arthouse circuit, I’m pretty badly biased against independent films made by Christians, for Christian audiences. I expect pure cheese, and that’s usually what I find. But dollar for production dollar, Facing the Giants is frankly an astounding success.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon
Jenn reviews at Hollywood Jesus: Seeing and hearing about the events that didn’t make the nightly news (and therefore didn’t make the high school history textbooks) offered a better, and perhaps even more balanced, representation of the time than anything I ever learned in school or in my straight-laced home.