The one good thing about living in some godforsaken quadrant of the country where the luscious awards-season heavy hitter Call Me by Your Name took forever and then some to open is that, by the time I had my chance to catch up with it, it had already moved from “rapturous praise” to “mild backlash”, […]
If you wanted to be unforgiving in the editing room, and maybe order up a few reshoots involving second-billed star Steve Carell, you could just about turn Battle of the Sexes into a routine, watch-and-then-forget-it sports biopic about Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) who was for a time the face of feminism in professional sports […]
We have, I’m happy to report, hit the point where the Pitch Perfect movies don’t give a fuck any more. The first Pitch Perfect, many lifetimes ago back in 2012, was a genuinely good musical comedy; Pitch Perfect 2, from 2015, was a tepid retread that broadened everything and in the process cheapened it. On […]
Lost in Paris is beguiling as all hell, and I would in a pinch call it the most satisfying feature comedy released in the United States in 2017, though that’s not a particularly competitive field. Still and all: beguiling. It’s a featherweight romantic comedy full of many tiny surprises and absolutely no big ones, and […]
Once upon a time there was an individual who was superficially a great deal like other individuals, but had sufficiently different interests than the rest of them that he was ostracised and mocked. And his self-confidence and willingness to be himself held the day in the end, but only after a third-act chase scene that […]
First things first: Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart, in that order, are the whole set of reasons to see Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. If none of those names stir any kind of pleasure in your heart, or worse still, if those names raise your hackles, it’s probably safest to ignore […]
Ordinarily, the fun challenge of reviewing a highly fucked-up movie that does things movies tend not to is to figure out how to describe it in a way that sounds appealing. The Lure has already taken care of that. This is a Polish musical-horror film set in a tacky disco/strip club in the 1980s – […]
Good Time is a delectable paradox: it is one of 2017’s most beautiful movies, despite only ever training its gaze on ugly things. I’m not quite sure how the filmmakers – director brothers Josh & Benny Safdie, cinematographer Sean Price Williams – managed it, but I certainly feel that I’ve been put on notice (and […]
Once upon a time, there was a famous person, who made a famous piece of art, but get this: the famous piece of art was inspired by the events he experienced in his life. In other words, my friends, we have here yet another “Shakespeare in Love about _____” movie, with the blank this particular […]
People talking a mile-a-minute about tightly-focused points of procedure, piling clauses upon clause until you realize that you’ve been listening to one nested sentence for the last 30 seconds; yes indeed, Molly’s Game was written by Aaron Sorkin, alright. Regrettably, there are very few (if any!) scenes where people have elaborate conversations while walking abreast […]
In these times of great social change and a rapidly-shifting baseline for how cinema attempts to position itself in the world, Darkest Hour is comfortingly reactionary bit of nothing. I don’t in anyway refer to its content, though that is too; I’m simply referring to how very much this feels like something that somebody might […]
2017 has been a big year for British-made (or at least, British director-made) movies about World War II, and it takes a lot to be the most fucking stupid out of all of them. But Churchill, written by Alex von Tunzelmann and directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, is amply up to the task. I hope we […]
