Every single review of The Zone of Interest, the fourth feature film directed by Jonathan Glazer, at some point will reference the subtitle of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Some reviews will mention it in the context of this being a very powerful illustration of Arendt’s most famous idea. […]
It’s odd to say of Insidious: The Red Door, no less than the fifth film in a series, “that sure seems like an unnecessary sequel”, but the Insidious series has followed a crooked path. First there was Insidious, which premiered in 2010 but for all intents and purposes is a 2011 film, and it was […]
The career of writer-director Nicole Holofcener has been one of immaculate consistency. In terms of quality: almost all of her films fall into a snug little sweet spot of “awfully good and lovely without ever being (or striving to be) bash-you-over-the-head-Great”, and while this may sound like a mild insult, that’s the sweet spot that […]
The title of The Quiet Girl isn’t messing around: the girl, nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is certainly very quiet. So is everything else about the film, in fact: even the overbearing musical score by Stephen Rennicks is still very quiet and soft while it’s weighting the movie down. For his debut feature, adapted from the […]
The Whale, essentially, does not work – “does not work as a movie”, I am almost tempted to say, in deference to its origins as a well-received stage play by Samuel D. Hunter (adapting the work to a screenplay himself). But frankly, I suspect it’s not any great shakes onstage, either; the dialogue and characterisations […]
For the U.S. film industry to have produced a knockoff of Child’s Play retooled to make the observation, “huh, did you know that there are dolls connected to the internet these days? What won’t they think of next” that is actually a good and watchable movie counts as a small miracle. For it to have produced […]
The game I enjoy playing so much, “what happens when Major International Film Auteur X moves outside of their native country and native language for the first time?” has been given a particularly unexpected pair of answers by Kore-eda Hirokazu, the Japanese creator of so many feather-soft stories of people on the edge of the […]
It’s a cheap shot to start a review of a movie with such a sturdy, meat-and-potatoes title as Women Talking with some joke about “they sure do!” or “well, you can’t say the movie didn’t tell you what to expect”, or whatnot. But it is, in fact, a movie that is to an extraordinary degree […]
The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie – it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I’m not sure how much you can “spoil” The Fabelmans: the story […]
Since its 1985 publication, Don DeLillo’s most celebrated novel, White Noise, has been one of cinema’s white whales. In various superficial respects, the book has always appeared ripe for adaptation—characters are vivid; snappy dialogue abounds; there’s even a literally central catastrophe that unmistakably lends itself to visual pyrotechnics. Yet it’s taken nearly 40 years for […]
Let’s start with the casting, since it’s the flashiest thing about Sam & Kate by twenty miles or so. This multigenerational romance stars two pairs of parent-child actors, the first Dustin Hoffman and son Jake Hoffman, the second Sissy Spacek and her daughter Schuyler Fisk. A cast like this raises the question: Do the young, […]
I don’t think it’s a good habit to get into to take account of the advertising campaign materials – part of what we call “paratexts” in the thinking-too-hard business – as part of a film review, but in the special case of Armageddon Time, I will make an exception. The film’s poster, which you can […]
