Jeremy Allen White has a commanding presence. Whether he’s the troubled but brilliant New York chef Carmy Berzatto in FX’s The Bear or the successful but haunted professional wrestler Kerry Von Erich in The Iron Claw, Allen shows how to make his character the one that you can’t take your eyes off of in each scene. Before his recent success and recognition from this show and movie, Allen was known for his recurring role on Showtime’s Shameless. During the show’s decade-long run, White was carving out a name for himself on the big screen during that time with critically acclaimed but mostly unseen Afterschool, We Gotta Get Out of This Place Bobby, and co-directors Hannah Marks (Don’t Make Me Go, Turtles All the Way Down) and Joey Power’s romantic dramedy After Everything.
Category Archives: Marisa Tomei
She Came To Me (2023)
The biggest compliment I can give Rebecca Miller’s (The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Maggie’s Plan) unmemorable She Came To Me was that it was creative. I crave originality. While none of the singular components were necessarily imaginative, the sum of the parts brought a freshness that kept me engaged. Unfortunately, I left feeling uninspired and disappointed as Miller dipped in and out of genres. Pegged as a romantic dramedy, I never felt involved enough with the characters to take the film seriously. Likewise, the comedy was a miss for me, though I heard some chuckling from the other ten or so people in my theater. And, while the film centered around intimate relationships at its core, this was far from checking off the romance genre checkbox. In all, it was pretty messy as it crawled towards a predictable finish line, misusing the talents of three of Hollywood’s biggest names in the process.
The King of Staten Island (2020)
Judd Apatow’s humor is my kind of humor. Actually, I should preface that some. The movies that Apatow directs (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, Funny People, Trainwreck) are my kind of humor. The films that he is merely a producer for are hit or miss. While I love Kicking and Screaming, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek, and The Big Sick, there are just as many of his produced films that I am not a fan of, most notably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. If anything, I wish I would stop producing altogether and spend more time writing and stepping behind the camera.
Before the Devil Knows Your’re Dead (2007)
Murphy’s Law. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Sidney Lumet’s (Guilty As Sin, Dog Day Afternoon) Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is a good-old-fashioned robbery gone wrong that involves older brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman – Capote, The Savages) and younger brother Hank (Sinister, Before Sunrise) fleecing the strip-mall jewelry store of their parents Charles (Albert Finney – Erin Brokovich, Tom Jones) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris – Spider-Man, Tom and Viv) on a day where neither parent was expected to be there.
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Captain America: Civil War is perhaps the greatest superhero movie that Christopher Nolan has not directed. My two favorite superhero movies (The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) belong to him. As of this post, my third favorite would probably be a toss-up between Batman Begins, Iron Man, and Captain America: Civil War. There are others (such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, etc.) that are up there, but there is clearly a distinction between the top 3 or 4 and all of the others. I hope that superhero movies continue to get better, but unfortunately, it feels like we get 3-4 bad ones for every good one we get. So when we get a movie like Captain America: Civil War, it’s important to take pause, see it, praise it, and encourage more movies like it because we know that poor movies will continue to be made because all of them seem to gross over $100 million easily. And the reason they do is our fault. We continue to see these terrible movies. But that is a different story for a different day.
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