The Current Cinema

What I've seen and how I've liked it

Hemsworth and a new kind of hammer, in “Crime 101”

Crime 101! I liked it. And I reviewed it for the AARP mag/website. You will notice the editorial quirk of citing the ages of the respect-your-elders cast members.

Cold Storage is enjoyable as well. Two watchable theatrical releases and it’s just mid-February! The year is looking up.

Tyler Perry’s Joe’s College Road Trip is the second Tyler Perry movie I’ve reviewed for the Times in seven months. Am I on a Tyler Perry beat for the Paper of Record? Stay tuned. Actually, this is kind of the most interesting and genuinely admirable Tyler Perry movie I’ve ever seen, for reasons that would constitute the worst spoiler possible were I to lay them out. While I did not make the film a Critics’ Pick, I will say if there’s a relatively painless way for you to see it — it’s on Netflix, so there you are, maybe, I’m actually professionally obliged to subscribe myself — you should avail yourselves of that.

I believe I’ve mentioned, briefly, my home experience of The Wild Geese. For Valentine’s Day Claire and I watched My Man Godfrey. Perfect. Last night we checked out Topsy-Turvy, one of the Great Films, period. I’ve been making my way through a Severin stash in varied states of hilarity and incredulity; more detail to come in a Physical Media Consumer Guide. These things take time. It’s possible that to keep the “content” here consistently green I’ll be doing mini-CGs for the forseeable future. Stay tuned.

The most fun we had in movie theater so far this month was seeing Nine To Five, which I myself had never seen in its entirety, at the Prospect Park Nitehawk. It’s a big-hearted hoot. The Nitehawk, incidentally, will be soon hosting a fabulous nine-week event programmed by Steven Soderbergh, nine Wednesdays of films that have been crucial in his aesthetic development, and I myself am definitely going to the screening of The Servant on March 11.