Last week, Netflix funded a limited theatrical release for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the eighteenth feature film directed by Joel and/or Ethan Coen, with the movie set for wider distribution on the corporation’s streaming platform […]
Tag: Movies
The Strawberry Criterion: A Star is Born
The genealogy of A Star is Born, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, traces an indirect lineage back to the dawn of American cinema, with three remakes and nine decades separating this most recent version from its oldest […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Ready Player One
The protagonist of Ready Player One, the new Steven Spielberg movie, plays video games as an avatar named “Parzival,” who all the other characters inexplicably call “Z.” This would be like having a friend named “Daniel” […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri
The setting of the latest Martin McDonough film, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, is unlike any in the history of cinema, science fiction included. Whether set on the surface of the moon or in the […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Black Panther
All superhero movies are stupid, but each superhero movie is stupid in its own special way. In the Marvel cinematic universe, this general stupidity tends to manifest itself in the forms of obligatory cross-promotion, bland […]
The Strawberry Criterion: Phantom Thread
The acclaimed dressmaker at the center of Phantom Thread, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, sews cryptic notes into the seams of his creations, secret messages never to be glimpsed by any eyes but his […]
The Strawberry Criterion: The Last Jedi
As there is matter and anti-matter, can there be film and anti-film? If the satisfaction of certain aesthetic and formal criteria can be said to make a film “recognizable,” what would an absolute failure to […]
