Eugene Weekly

Six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Willis) lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in the Bathtub, a damp, wild, insular place at what feels like the edge of the world (but is more likely the edge of New Orleans). She tends to their chickens and pigs, goes fishing with her father, and draws creatures on cardboard boxes in her house — her own scrappy house, standing on crooked stilts like something out of a dark fairytale. Continue reading →

High expectations sometimes lay you low, and the very word “superhero” spurs one’s anticipation of a movie adaptation to leap tall multiplexes in a single bound and travel faster than a speeding bullet to the box office. It can’t be helped. Walking into the July 20 midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, my hopes were high. I assumed that this grand finale would be not only a step above all predecessors, but also well worth the particular discomfort of cramming into a packed theater at midnight. Neither of these assumptions panned out. Continue reading →

I would like to see Bill Nighy be a nice guy in more movies. He’s so effective as a ragged, aging musician (Love Actually) or as, say, a creepy ancient vampire (the Underworld series) that I forget what a wonderful actor he is in ordinary roles. Continue reading →