George Bailey’s Shrinkage
It’s a Wonderful Life of lowered expectations.
33 Articles by: Eileen Jones
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Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of the book Filmsuck, USA. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
A Rough Night at the Opera
John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Girls of the Golden West is bland, poorly staged liberalism.
Seventeen Soviet Films
The October Revolution unleashed cinematic brilliance that even decades of political censorship couldn’t extinguish.
His Finest Hour
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is short, action-packed, and not as bad as it could have been!
The Not-So-Beguiled
Sofia Coppola’s new film gets rid of everything that made the original interesting.
The Uncanny City
A new translation of the 1970s horror novel The Twenty Days in Turin is an eerily resonant read in 2017.
Against Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep’s speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since Trump’s election.
Carrie Fisher (1956–2016)
What we liked about Carrie Fisher was that she seemed inclined to tell the truth, and almost nobody does that, certainly not Hollywood stars.
The Romance of American Liberalism
Grading a century of liberal film presidents.
Honoring the Real Nat Turner
The Birth of a Nation isn’t up to capturing the brutal, prophetic justice of Nat Turner’s rebellion.
Fake Controversy, Terrible Comedy
The new Ghostbusters isn’t a feminist triumph. It’s just a bad movie.
Back to the Free State
The Free State of Jones isn’t very good entertainment, but it deserves credit for getting much of the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction right.
Nobody Wants Some
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! assumes we’d all like to return to the days when the boys ruled campus.
Death to All Superheroes
Batman is a fascist. Superman is dead. I’m bored.
The Means of Escape
The communists in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar! are silly caricatures, but the film upholds basic Marxist premises.
When Revenge Goes Wrong
Instead of a captivating revenge film, The Revenant quickly becomes an overwrought mess.
The Sixth Decade
M. Night Shymalan plays on our fears of growing old in his new movie The Visit.
The Cinematic Lost Cause
Why have so many films dealing with the Civil War embraced the Confederate struggle?
Dreams of the Fifties
Channeling Steven Spielberg, Jurassic World sets the “bad” forces of social upheaval against the “good” traditional values.
Selma and the Struggle
Selma isn’t just a great movie. Its sense of history and justice is deeply politicizing.