Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) – Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez

I love the original Sin City. A star-studded ensemble cast in an ultraviolent, beautiful, and heavily stylized (essentially) noir film? That’s definitely my bag. I didn’t have much hope that A Dame to Kill For would live up to its predecessor and after having seen it, I think it’s safe to say that it didn’t. […]

The Imitation Game (2014) – Morten Tyldum

The Imitation Game has been quite a crowd-pleaser because it is both a satisfying thriller and a poignant biopic. Taking the center stage of the film is Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), an idiosyncratic and socially awkward British mathematician and prodigy. Turing was hired to crack Nazi Germany’s Enigma, a code used by the Germans for […]

Rebirth of a Blog

As you may have noticed, Flim Crickets has had a bit of a makeover. We were having some reliability/stability issues with the blogging platform we were originally on and have made the decision to take our considerable business elsewhere. Take that, blog.com. We ain’t missin’ you at all. Even better, we have our own domain […]

The Science of Interstellar

SPOILER WARNING As an astrophysicist, I had very high hopes for Interstellar, particularly with Kip Thorne, a famous theoretical physicist, on board as producer and science adviser. I was disappointed with some glaring issues with the science, but overall it is relatively solid. First, I want to discuss the visuals, where Kip’s influence really shows. […]

Interstellar (2014) – Christopher Nolan

(Editors Note: I was originally going to make some likely ignorant comments about the science of Interstellar but instead, we’ll be having our first guest contributor on the blog. Michael Tremmel, PhD Candidate in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Washington, will be giving us his assessment of the film’s science shortly.) I’m a […]

Birdman (2014) – Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is an audacious film. It was designed to make it seem like the entire movie was shot in one take, when in fact it is a series of long, uninterrupted scenes seamlessly spliced together. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in last […]

Nightcrawler (2014) – Dan Gilroy

Nightcrawler has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing. That is serious critical acclaim, and it’s hard not to look at that number and place some unfair expectations on a movie even when you go in as clueless as I like to (based on the poster above, I was expecting Drive). I […]

Gone Girl (2014) – David Fincher

Gone Girl is the type of film that is right up David Fincher’s alley, the man who authored Seven, Zodiac, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy Dunne, the film is a seeming whodunit when Nick returns home and discovers his wife is missing […]

Sanjuro (1962) – Akira Kurosawa

I really, really wish I had watched this movie before last week. It sat on my shelf for about three and a half years, the first movie I bought sight unseen based purely on the strength of its predecessor Yojimbo (they came together in a boxed set). I’m not sure what kept me from watching […]

Birth of a Blog

I suppose this post is equal parts introduction and disclaimer. INTRODUCTION For years now, essentially since I came out as a self-proclaimed “film buff”, people have asked me if I write reviews on the movies I watch. The lingering impression I got from those interactions was the almost palpable disappointment when I answered in the […]