If I may risk being pithy about the gravest subject in the wide world, we’re living through a golden age of documentaries about mass killings in southeast Asia. Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary, extraordinarily crushing dyad of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, with their historiographical study of the murder of accused Communists in […]

Here’s the critic’s paradox about Winter’s Tale: in order to make people excited about watching it, one has to explain in detail what it’s doing, but knowing in detail what it’s doing takes away some of the fun of watching it. It is, anyway, not a film for all audiences, by any stretch of the […]

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of […]

The story of Moses and the exodus of the Hebrews from Pharaonic Egypt is, when you get right down to it, one of the key works of literary narrative in the entire history of the world, so there’s no reason a filmmaker shouldn’t poke at it. That’s what shared foundational texts are there for. So […]

The Homesman is a film with an unimaginably specific and small ideal audience. It is, to begin with, a Western; a Western lover’s Western, drunk on the iconography of the genre and steeped in an awareness of the kind of myths told in Western cinema and more than that, the particular language and tenor of […]

“Scandinavian social realism” and “fluffy character-driven comedy” are what you might call non-overlapping magisterial. But that’s not the sort of thing to stop Lukas Moodysson, whose seventh feature We Are the Best! marries exactly those two genres and does it with surprising ease and charm. As one of European cinema’s foremost humanists, Moodysson has always […]

There are two ways, I think, that one could go about making a story of Alan Turing and his key role in inventing the computer as a means of cracking a Nazi code during the Second World War. One way would be to go all-in on the psychological aspect, and take it for granted that […]

And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at […]

There is blackness, to begin with. Impenetrable black, with unfocused electric guitar chords slicing through the nothing. And then comes the giggling, shrill and mad, the voice of some otherworldly hellspawn that has seen things that any living thing would pray to never see, to never imagine. And then the voice speaks, and its words […]

There is praise that sounds like an insult, even when it’s not, and in that vein may I offer: Nightcrawler has outstanding eye lighting. Like, it’s all I could think about, in scene after scene after scene, how commanding and how unconventional the lights being trained on the main character’s eyes were. This shouldn’t be […]

Titling one’s movie Calvary, as writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done in his second feature (and also the second entry in his project to give amazing lead roles to Brendan Gleeson), boxes things in pretty well. It has to be a film with a walking, talking Christ surrogate, pretty much, and Calvary‘s is a doozy: […]

The question has been nagging at me for some weeks: six years later, is there any sort of value to be had in another white male critic lambasting the first Sex and the City movie? The good news, then, is that I’m not entirely inclined to do that. Not all of it, anyway. The trick, […]