Wonder is every inch a Nice Movie. It offers very simple, bromidic observations about having a good heart and being yourself and what have you. It centers on a disfigured little boy that the makeup designers have carefully contrived to look more adorable than actually off-putting in any way. It carefully vanishes away all of […]
I’m sure I missed something, but did it really take 24 years before we finally got a knock-off of The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom? That’s not exactly what I, Tonya is, though it’s pretty good for a first approximation. The child of Positively True Adventures and The Wolf of Wall Street, now that gets us […]
A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. In 2011, Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero co-directed a very dark-hearted short film called Birdboy, based on Vázquez’s comic Psiconautas. It left only a bit of an impression on me at the time, but over the years has clung voraciously to the lower tiers […]
The miraculous alchemy of The Post lies in how great it can be, despite also being all of the terrible things one might prejudge it for. It is, for starters, one of the most unabashedly Oscarbaity films to come out in a season that has been almost entirely devoid of traditional Oscarbait. And it is […]
Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner The Square is a very particular, and at least mildly irritating, kind of satire. It’s a sometimes delicate, and oftentimes savage, attack on the moral inner lives of a certain kind of bourgeois intellectual type (who is probably male, definitely white, socially liberal, and inclined towards post-modernist art), and […]
If one holds onto the belief that movies are first and above all meant to be emotion-generating objects (and this is not the only belief about movies one could hold, but it’s the one I’m happy to stick with as an operating principle), one could hardly hope for a more movie-ish movie than The Work. […]
Three cheers for conceptual integrity: the animated feature My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is a nigh-perfect marriage of style and narrative content, bringing to life the bored apocalyptic fantasies of a bookish, smart, socially inept high school boy of 16, who takes pleasure in casting himself as the hero and his social […]
The opening ten minutes of BPM (Beats per Minute) (an inscrutably poor re-titling of the original French title, which translates as 120 Beats per Minute) are among the most bracing and original in any movie I’ve seen in 2017. Before we’re given a minute to situate ourselves, we’re dumped into the backstage area where a […]
You ever met that guy, at a party or wherever, who you see before you hear him, loudly (and perfectly!) quoting from some not-very-well-known movie? And maybe you think to yourself “oh, this guy gets it”, and you drift over to chat for a bit about how much you both love that movie, and it […]
Fairly early on in the docu-memoir-biography Jane, Dr. Jane Goodall offers a summary of the state of primate research at the dawn of the 1960s that includes reference to a primate scientist whose attempts to blend in with subjects involved covering himself in baboon shit. There is obviously no reason at all for me to […]
There’s nothing too sensitive in here, spoiler-wise, but there’s not nothing. I will try to warn you any time I talk about that occurs after the first 20 minutes or so. The obvious praise first: Star Wars: The Last Jedi swings for the fences, and of course that’s something to be grateful for. Particularly for […]
I cannot tell you about the moments in Faces Places that brought me the most happiness. This is partially because those moments are clustered in the film’s last 30 minutes, and they are far too wonderful in their little surprises for me to dare spoil them. This is partially, also, because they are so pure […]
