Brick is a special film, a jazzy, surreal hybrid of high school drama and classic film noir. Writer/director Johnson's script is filled with heavily stylized dialogue, influenced by '30s crime writer Dashiell Hammett (in fact the story reminds me of Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest), so baroque and poetic that it's hardly even English anymore. Some viewers may get confused… read more!

One of several 2008 releases pushed back to 2009 for financial reasons, including Star Trek, The Soloist, The Road, and Harry Potter 6, The Brothers Bloom sneaks into theaters at perhaps the wrong time: the start of the summer blockbuster season. Well, perhaps the distributors were hoping for a counter-programming audience to show up. Rian Johnson's fanciful followup to his… read more!

Less a sequel to writer/director Rian Johnson's Knives Out and more "Another Benoit Blanc Mystery", Glass Onion brings back the deeply Southern and ambiguously gay detective (charmingly played by Daniel Craig) for a new whodunnit entirely removed from its predecessor. This time Blanc is summoned to a private Greek island on which a smarmy tech billionaire (Edward Norton, perfectly cast)… read more!

There's nothing but fun to be had in Rian Johnson's modern spin on the classic whodunnit, in which a wealthy author of mystery novels (Christopher Plummer) is found dead in his study, his throat slashed and yet ruled a suicide, and of course several members of his terrible family have motives for killing him. A private detective (Daniel Craig, relishing… read more!

Because I am such a fan of writer/director Rian Johnson's first film Brick, and have been long convinced that he is a major talent, Looper is one of those films that I purposefully went to see without watching any trailers or reading any reviews beforehand. I knew only its basic premise: that Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a hit man whose targets… read more!

My fandom of Star Wars is so strong that, once again, I waited about three weeks after the opening of The Last Jedi to catch a $5 matinee. No IMAX, no 3-D, no nothing. But guess what? I loved it. I've admired writer/director Rian Johnson's work ever since Brick, but I was a little apprehensive about his entry into the… read more!