The opening credits of Nocturnal Animals feature several obese women, naked but for drum majorette hats, dancing in slow motion. Nothing that resembles this ever happens anywhere else in the whole movie. I can think of a few different explanations for why director Tom Ford would have seen fit to include this, none of which […]
The trailer for Hidden Figures included a line of dialogue so utterly wretched in its flat-footed expository gracelessness that I maintained some hope it was one of those things that was only ever shot to give maximum possible clarity to the ads. Silly me. In fact, the version of the line that shows up in […]
If Captain Fantastic had come out nine years earlier, you’d suppose it was a minimally inspired Little Miss Sunshine knock-off: a colorfully eccentric family travels across These United States in a vehicle unapologetically nostalgic for the 1960s (a refurbished school bus named “Steve”, decked out in hippie decor, in this case), with a misfit teenager […]
“It’s stagey” say so many of the critics, in regard to the long-awaited film adaptation of Fences, August Wilson’s magnificent 1985 play about a former Negro Leagues player emotionally terrorising everyone around him. “It feels like you’re just watching Denzel Washington and Viola Davis doing the play, just as they for 114 performances back in […]
Only a director as reliably extraordinary as Jim Jarmusch could make a movie as sensitive and heartbreaking as Paterson and have it feel vaguely disappointing. I cannot speak for any other fans of the director’s work, but what I like most about his now twelve narrative features is how the best of them seriously interrogate […]
It’s tempting to write off I, Daniel Blake as just Ken Loach doing that Ken Loach that he does so well, as if being one the greatest leftist message-movie directors in the history of the English language cinema is something to sniff at. Certainly it’s more than tempting to look at the uniquely great main […]
There’s almost nothing that the 2003 sci-fi horror film Dreamcatcher has in common with the 2016 Oscarbait melodrama Collateral Beauty, and yet they’re the only movies I can ever remember having seen that are both bad in almost exactly the same way. To wit, we have here a movie that has been made by very […]
Toni Erdmann is a two-hour and 42-minute-long comedy in German, and I foreground that fact because I feel like if I went on and on about how completely wonderful it is, and only at the end got around to mentioning those facts, you would probably consider that I was trying to play a trick on […]
A review requested by Jakob G, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It’s a bad habit to compare one film to another and count that as a review, but oh, how hard it is to talk about Baraka without constantly checking it against Koyaanisqatsi. The two films, released […]
Manchester by the Sea is the kind of movie wherein, the more one tries to excitedly talk about all of its best parts, the more it sounds like a suffocating nightmare. “It’s such a great depiction of crippling guilt, like no other movie that I can think of! The main character is devoured by the […]
It’s not just that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is my favorite Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back; it’s how damned easy it was for me to come that conclusion. Like, not a fraction of a second of hesitation. For those of you who just wanted the opinion & would prefer to […]
“The Empire Strikes Back is the darkest Star Wars film”, they say; “the Rebellion loses everything, Luke has an existential crisis, Han is gone”. Or, “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is the darkest Star Wars“, the say; “the whole galaxy is overrun by evil, the very flesh is burned off of […]
