Neil Morris

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR Opening Friday As Abel Morales prepares to purchase a loading and storage facility on New York City’s East River from garment-district Orthodox Jews in A MOST VIOLENT YEAR, he suddenly walks out to deliver the closing documents to his wife, Anna, who is waiting by the car to cosign. “Fuck these […]

AMERICAN SNIPER Opening Friday Even the most acclaimed movies directed by Clint Eastwood struggle with internal moral contradictions. There’s pacifist posturing in the ultra-violent Unforgiven and a message of tolerance supposedly carried by a rank racist in Gran Torino. Even the pro-feminist Million Dollar Baby rests on a misogynistic foundation. There’s an impulse to write […]

SELMA Opening Friday Early in Selma, Martin Luther King Jr.more channeled than merely played by David Oyelowoand other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference rejoice when they learn that Sheriff Jim Clark’s reaction to their planned protests is expected to be more like the kneejerk public brutality of “Bull” Connor in Birmingham, Alabama than […]

THE GAMBLER Opening Dec. 25 In the remake of 1974’s THE GAMBLER, Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) directs a reworked screenplay by William Monahan. Not knowing when to stand, the film doubles down on narrative bets until its plot and protagonist go bust. Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) is a self-loathing author […]

FOXCATCHER Opening Friday Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson famously said. In director Bennett Miller’s FOXCATCHER, based on a true story, that indictment applies to an egotistical, elitist eccentric named John E. du Pont. Although his inherited fortune originated in ammunitions dealings, du Pont (portrayed with reptilian eeriness by Steve […]

INHERENT VICEOpening Friday I wish I could declare that Inherent Vice is a hip, hazy portrait of the transition period between the social upheaval of the 1960s and the rise of cultural and political conservatism in the 1980s. I would have liked to examine how writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latter-day film noir captures the flashpoint […]