Articles by J. Don Birnam

In 2021, during the COVID Oscars, Sir Anthony Hopkins surprised awards handicappers by winning his second Best Actor statuette for his bravura turn in the family melodrama The Father. Written and directed by Florian Zeller, who adapted his own play, The Father saw Hopkins bring a quiet power to his tender portrayal of an aging man struggling with memory loss, and it boasted clever editing that complemented its powerful script. […]

The frustrating thing about a movie like New Gerald Butler Film is that it provides undeniable entertainment while laying to waste all fundamental rules of creative, interesting, and surprising filmmaking. The movie — actually called Plane and coming to theaters this Friday via Lionsgate — is Gerald Butler’s latest salvo in his (and Liam Neeson‘s) fusillade of action movies starring aging male superheroes that double as shots across the bow […]

Over the last few decades, American remakes of successful international films have a decidedly mixed track record. On the one hand, we have brilliant, refreshing second looks like The Ring (based on the Japanese film Ringu) or The Departed (based on the Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs), while on the other, there are spectacular duds ranging from Secret in Their Eyes (based on Argentina’s stunning The Secret in Their […]

At 37 years old, writer-director Damien Chazelle is quite young to be a Hollywood veteran — he’s still the youngest person to have ever won the Oscar for Best Director — but like a grizzled filmmaker twice his age, he sure does have a lot to say about showbiz and its difficult relationship with the City of Los Angeles. Chazelle named La La Land after the city itself and examined […]

Ever since the unparalleled success of Titanic made writer/director James Cameron the King of the World, the cinematic world has wondered whether he would ever go back to the water. In Avatar: The Way of Water, the much-anticipated sequel to the astonishingly successful 2009 film, Avatar, Cameron has done so. His return trip is mostly a welcome marriage of the two narrative themes and styles that propelled his last two […]

Director Darren Aronofsky’s new film, The Whale, stars Brendan Fraser as a dying man, who weighs north of 500 pounds and whose troubled life is embodied by his enlarged form and the self-destructive behavior that led him to look that way. The film immediately raises questions about the presumably unintentional shaming of the obesity it portrays, whether the filmmakers broached this difficult subject with sufficient thoughtfulness, and why this story […]

Michael Ausiello‘s 2017 memoir, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies in the End, gets the cinematic treatment at the hands of The Big Sick director Michael Showalter, who’s working from a script adapted by David Marshall Grant and noted sex and relationship columnist Dan Savage. The brutally sad story chronicles the 14-year relationship between the author (played by Jim Parsons) and his boyfriend-turned-husband, photographer Kit Cowan (Ben Aldridge), culminating with the […]