My Own Little World

As soon as I saw who was involved in The Post , I was hooked – you give me Steven Spielberg directing people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, and it’s kind of like the most surefire Oscar contender you can get. And I got exactly the film I expected with The Post : a high-quality, entertaining, and even slightly informative movie with some great performances and few if any flaws behind the camera. It’s probably irrational for me to assume that The Post could be any greater than the sum of its parts, but that sum – as good as it was – is something I have seen before. Spielberg has gotten into a groove of these kinds of movies, these politically-charged dramas that tend to show a correlation between the world of the past and the world of today. The Post does everything that films like Lincoln and Munich have already done and done well; as lazy as that may sound for someone with Spielberg’s profile, this film does make some very pointed connections between the Nixon and Trump ad...

In closing the door on 2016, I realize that there are a lot of films that I have seen that unfortunately I was unable to review for one reason or another. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't want you guys to know what I think of most of these films, so just like the last couple of years I will be doing a few posts over the next month or so wrapping up all of the films I got a chance to see from this past year. This time, I've got a Tim Burton fantasy book adaptation, Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, and a surprisingly good duo of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children  - Not a waste of time.  This was a surprisingly entertaining fantasy film. Miss Peregrine's definitely has its own share of writing and editing problems, but the solid visual effects and generally good performances (especially from the child actors) mask them pretty well. The pacing is a little variable and drags a bit in the second act; however, the clim...