Let’s at least give Don’t Worry Darling this much credit: it’s easy to imagine this being a much drearier and more haranguing social satire than it is. In large part, this is because the film has such an extraordinarily hard time keeping any of its many ideas straight, or developing any of them to any […]
Not Okay, the Hulu-based sophomore effort from actress-writer-director Quinn Shephard, opens with a much-discussed “content warning” that the film we are about to experience contains “flashing lights, themes of trauma, and an unlikable female protagonist.” It’s a tweak of the viewer’s nose intended to set a cheeky tone and make some kind of statement about […]
The phrase “elevated horror” is one I am very reluctant to use, since its meaning seems to generally land on something amorphous like “horror movies that people who think they’re too good for horror movies are willing to praise”. But there’s definitely something there, and “elevated horror” is as good a shorthand to describe that […]
Ascension, the extraordinarily confident feature-length debut of documentarian Jessica Kingdon, manages the seemingly impossible feat of being, all the same time, a thrilling formal object transforming the stuff of real life into abstract visual art; a very angry diatribe about the the human cost of industrialisation in modern China; and a patiently curious, hands-off observation […]
There is a moment in Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) , about 57 minutes into the 118-minute film, where we see something that is not at all meaningful in and of itself: in the middle of a performance of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” by Gladys Knight & […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
If I may risk dipping my toes into The Discourse, I would like to offer a thought. It is possible for two things to be simultaneously true: first, that smartphones and social media have absolutely turned the brains of everyone under the age of 45 into mashed bananas, and left us a society unable to […]
The weird thing about Candyman – second film of that exact title, and an explicit sequel to the first, which I get is like a “thing” we have now, but I sure don’t like it – is that the one thing it was supposed to be doing, it’s kind of very terrible at, and the […]
It’s an uncharitable thing to say about such a passionate work of cinema-activism, but there was not one moment in the 81 minutes of Time, a documentary about the excesses of the U.S. prison system and how it affected one family over the course of 20 years, where I could shake the feeling that I […]
An apology, or if you prefer a warning: this is perhaps less on the order of a review than it is a rant. The thing is, I found Nomadland to be a completely repulsive movie, cloying when it works and actively pernicious when it doesn’t, and simply having to choke it down was galling enough; […]
There is certainly a very good film within Better Days. Arguably, in fact, there are three: a story about high school bullying, a story about the high pressure put upon teenagers to perform well academically, and a love story about two teenaged outsiders finding strength in each other’s presence. It’s not very hard to see […]
The detention center at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where hundreds of men were (and in some cases still are) held for years at a time, mostly without having been formally charged with a crime or tried before a judge, represents what I would consider the single most flagrant human rights violation perpetrated by the United […]
