Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999
(123) 555-6789
email@address.com
You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab.
Link to read me page with more information.
search for me
Kali Reis and Chris Pratt are pitiless LAPD cops in Mercy. (Amazon MGM Studios)
We used to crash cars in movies in this country, dammit. My Washington City Paper review of what I’m hoping will be one of the worst pictures of 2026 is right here.
Michael Bahsil as John Lewis at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (Chris Banks)
My feature on Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest, a new musical opening in March at Mosaic Theater, is in your Washington City Paper.
Jack Black and Paul Rudd can’t save this ssssssssssstinker. (Sony Pictures)
You’ll want to sit down and do some exercises to limber up your brain before you try to process their supernova of perverse inspiration: Their new “Anaconda” is no mere reboot but in fact a midlife-crisis comedy about four pals who travel from Buffalo to the Amazon (as played by Queensland, Australia) to knock out a no-budget, guerilla-style remake of the 1997 Sony Pictures trash classic “Anaconda,” a fondly recalled object from their youths.
Still on the fence? Your stars are Paul Rudd and Jack Black, those winningly youthful 56-year-olds whose shtick is, like Rudd’s face, evergreen.
My Washington Post review of Anaconda, a toothless nomedy, is here.
My twentieth holiday mixtape, One Jingle After Another, hath arrived to facilitate your hall-decking and gay appparel-donning. Kick out the jams, Christmas-lovers.
He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…(20th Century Studios)
I wish I could give a more full-throated endorsement to the third, not-as-long-awaited Avatar, but I’m starting to have some real reservations about my first favorite filmmaker’s life’s work. My Washington City Paper review is here. You can also hear me discuss the movie with Stephen Thompson and Reanna Cruz on Pop Culture Happy Hour below.
Jesse Buckley (center) would like to thank the Academy in advance. (Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)
I hope I’m not being obstinate in my Washington City Paper review of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s lyrical adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. I first read about the brief life of Hamnet Shakespeare in an issue of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, published in 1990, decades before Gaiman was unmasked as a predator.
In his 2015 book Silver Screen Fiend, comedian and Broad Run High School Class of 1987 graduate Patton Oswalt recalls that he worked at a three-screen cinema at the intersection of Dranesville Road and Route 7 in Sterling, Virginia. That happens to be the theater where my dad took me to see The Running Man, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-headlined adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novella set in the year 2025, three or four months after Oswalt’s graduation. When I read Oswalt’s book, it occurred to me that Oswalt might’ve been the guy who sold my dad one adult and one kid ticket to The Running Man on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon 38 years ago.
I see now that Oswalt graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1991, so when The Running Man opened in November 1987, he would’ve been down in Williamsburg, most of the way through the first semester of his freshman year. Unless he was coming home to work at the theater on weekends! I don’t recall him saying anything about that in his book.
The subject of Silver Screen Fiend is the way Oswalt’s exploding cinephilia as a Los Angeles resident in his late twenties, aided and abetted by the brilliant every-night-a-double-feature programming of the New Beverly Theater, curdled into something very like addiction. As a guy who used to drive down to the New Beverly a lot during my own late twenties in Southern California, and who is now frequently at one of two Alamo Drafthouse locations within bicycling range of my apartment on the evenings when I’m not attending a critics’ screening of a new release, I think about that a lot.
Anyway, my Washington Post review of director Edgar Wright’s new, more faithful adaptation of King’s novella is here.
Love the One You’re With: Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi. (20th Century Studios)
I fear I’ve let you all down by not publishing a thinkpiece exploring What It All Means that both of the Arnold Schwarzenegger / Jesse Ventura movies from 1987, Predator and The Running Man, have a sequel and a remake (respectively) hitting cinemas a week apart from one another, 38 years later.
Anyway, my Washington City Paper review of the new Predator: Badlands is here.
You can also listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode where I discussed the film with pals Glen Weldon and Ronald Young, Jr. below.
