Few critics have angered me more over the years than David Ehrlich, but when he’s right, he’s right:

“The frantic and extremely funny mid-film chase through the streets of central Rome, during which Hunt is handcuffed to the sexy pickpocket (franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell) who might be able to lead him to the MacGuffin. A jaw-dropping ‘how the fuck did they do that?’ mega-flex in an age when movies are seldom magical enough to beg that question, the city-wide jailbreak combines artfully destructive slapstick with the loudest car crashes you’ve ever heard to create the kind of cinematic euphoria that still can’t be faked or forged at home. VR headsets might allow rich people to enjoy IMAX-sized screens on their living room couches, but Dead Reckoning is a bone-shaking reminder that sound is the real secret weapon of the theatrical experience.

“Not since La Dolce Vita has a film more effectively transformed ancient Rome into a modern playground, a fitting touch for a blockbuster so desperate to squeeze a few new dollops of joy from the ruins that surround it.”

When it opened on 12.25.06, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men (’06) was a dystopian foretelling of social breakdown and urban degeneration 21 years hence. The opening scene is captioned “16th November, 2027,” and the general London atmosphere (are we looking at Regent Street?) instantly tells us that this once-great city — once a nourishing spiritual watering hole for Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock, Tony Richardson and The Beatles — has become a bit bedraggled and third-worldish, air-polluted and populated with riff-raff…over-crowded, cacophonous and generally down-at-the-heels.

Not all of it (there are still pockets of order and tranquility with green-lawned parks and red-coated king’s guards marching along) but London is clearly edging toward some kind of ruffian, seen-better-days anarchy.

As we speak 11.16.27 is only four years hence or just around the corner, and I have to say that as I was walking east on 42nd Street last week in the mid-evening (following the AMC Empire all-media screening of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One) I was glancing at the overweight, sandal-wearing, presumably under-educated animals and feeling the general decay and lack of couth and even fraying civility and saying to myself “Jesus, this is almost like Children of Men…not classically dystopian in a Cormac McCarthy or Mad Max sense but drifting in that direction…even when 42nd Street was a grindhouse rathole in the ’60s it had a certain regimented order and aspirational vibe….no longer.”

Initially posted on 9.19.21: As most HE readers know, I got “Scarlet Letter”-ed in March ’21 when Critics Choice honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio booted me out of their organization after being pressured by hysterical wokesters.

It all stemmed from my having posted a sentence written by someone other than myself — a statement which sat on HE for an hour or less before I took it down.

The sentence alluded to the Atlanta massage parlor killings (the victims of which were Asian woman, although Robert Aaron Long‘s motivation wasn’t racial as much as an “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia,” according to state Rep. Bee Nguyen) and how this tragedy might have affected Oscar voter sentiments.

The sentence read as follows: “If there was one millionth of a chance in hell that Chloé Zhao and Nomadland weren’t going to win Oscars, the Atlanta massage parlor killings just snuffed out that chance.” Not my thought and or a view I believed in or cared about, but for one fleeting moment I thought “wow, that’s a hot-button statement that readers might want to kick around.” Throw him to the wolves!

Certain publicists who didn’t like me to begin with for my bluntly worded opinions seized upon the CCA eviction as an excuse to take me off their screening invite lists, etc. Six weeks ago I wrote Joey Berlin and John DeSimio a letter about this incident and gave them what-for.

Not long after the article appeared HE regular Bobby Peru posted the following:

I’ve pointed this out before, but three similar incidents (tragic news affecting Oscar fortunes) happened within the last nine years.

1. In Boris Kachka’s 2.25.14 Vulture piece about Oscar bloggers (in which I was prominently covered), THR‘s Scott Feinberg was referenced doing the same thing.

Kachka: “Every controversy is quickly spun into the 24-hour Oscar cycle. A few short hours after Dylan Farrow renewed her molestation charges [against Woody Allen], there was Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter’s tireless columnist (and this year’s most accurate predictor so far) authoring a piece titled “Dylan Farrow’s Op-Ed Targets Woody Allen, But Could Hurt Cate Blanchett More (Analysis).”

2. Right after the Ferguson Grand Jury report came out on 11.25.14, I tweeted that a possible “strike a match rather than curse the darkness” response to this otherwise tragic event might be a surge of industry Best Picture support for Selma. Yup — another instance of the wrong HE tweet at the wrong time. But all I said was that symbolically lighting a candle rather than lamenting the ugliness might be a good thing in the end.

The Twitter community didn’t dig it. I was all but roasted alive for saying this. Many people tweeted that I sounded like an insensitive asshole. How dare I suggest, after all, that there was (or might be) linkage between Ferguson and Selma‘s Oscar chances.

But at heart I had tweeted a positive sentiment. I was thinking, you see, of Martin Luther King’s words about how only love can eradicate hate. I was thinking that standing by a film about human dignity, compassion and human rights would serve as a positive response to the Ferguson situation.

3. A couple of days later Selma director director Ava DuVernay pointed out a direct connection between her film and what had happened in Ferguson.

She did so in an Eric Kohn Indiewire interview with herself and Fruitvale Station director-writer Ryan Coogler, the main subject being their support of the Black Friday Blackout.

For me, the stand-out portion was when Kohn asked DuVernay if she saw “any direct connections between today’s climate in the immediate aftermath of Ferguson in the story of Selma.” DuVernay responded as follows: “Yes, absolutely. It’s the same story repeated. The same exact story.

“An unarmed black citizen is ‎assaulted with unreasonable force and fatal gunfire by a non-black person who is sworn to serve and protect them. A small town that is already fractured by unequal representation in local government and law enforcement begins to crack under the pressure. People of color, the oppressed, take to the street to make their voices heard. The powers that be seek to extinguish those voices.”

Feinberg, Kachka, DuVernay, Kohn…they saw a real-life tragedy in the real-news world, detected an Oscar-reflecting narrative and jumped right into it. And nobody said boo. I posted a real-lfe-tragedy-meets-Oscar-odds comment that someone else had written (and which I posted for a mere hour), and I was sent to the guillotine. If there was a God, my head would be seamlessly re-attached and others (many others) would be facing the kiss of steel in my place.

Three days after HE’s summary of recently departed female DEI execs (“Dropping Like Flies”), another diversity lassie has been cut loose.

SPOILERS FOR SLUGS WHO LIVE UNDER ROCKS: I’m repeating myself as I often do, but now that everyone (and I mean everyone) in every continent on the globe has seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I need to again emphasize something important:

Failing to allow poor wounded Indiana Jones to remain in 212 B.C. Syracuse and in the glorious company of Archimedes was a huge mistake, as that would have been a perfect finale all around.

I wasn’t just disappointed about Phoebe Waller Bridge slugging Harrison Ford and somehow dragging him back to 1969 New York City, I was crestfallen. Hell, I was on the verge of tears — “They just blew a perfect ending!”

Posted on 12.2.11: Steve McQueen‘s Shame demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.

Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.

“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, probably doomed.

“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…I can’t do this.

“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung.

Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”

Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.

On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”

From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”