Movie Reviews
In case my review of the (don’t call it quirky, don’t call it quirky) quirky psycho-thriller Buster’s Mal Heart didn’t fully convey it, I want to further express my delight at the film’s portrayal of …
“You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you …
Terence Davies’s slow and sumptuous A Quiet Passion turns the famously reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (played mostly and hauntedly by Cynthia Nixon) into an unenthusiastic but unshakable martyr for her sex. It’s not that she …
Uh-oh. You’ve got America’s Most Beloved Actor (TM) Tom Hanks plus Emma Watson, the star of 2017’s biggest hit (Beauty and the Beast), in a techno-thriller designed to push everyone’s buttons about the companies whose …
Halfway through the trailer for Unforgettable, a warning voice began yelling in my ear: Oh no... it can’t be... SOMEONE WENT AND BUDGETED ANOTHER KATHERINE HEIGL PICTURE! It’s been two years since Heigl’s appeared in …
“Why is Anne Hathaway the most hated star in Hollywood?” is just one of the first-page results when you google “Anne Hathaway Hollywood.” The others are similar. It’s almost enough to make you love her …
Artists are a famously difficult bunch: if they’re not wreaking havoc as they wrestle their demons into something fit for public consumption, then they’re plundering everyone and everything around them in service of their precious …
If you are a certain sort of enterprising soul — that is, the sort who doesn’t want to pay for stuff — you can find the video of Werner Herzog’s masterclass in filmmaking out there …
Unlike most purveyors of based-on-a-true-story biopics, Werner Herzog didn’t wait until the closing crawl to reveal a snapshot of his real life Queen of the Desert. Even before the opening credits announce that the part …
Director and co-writer Ido Fluk’s The Ticket stars a lean and hungry Dan Stevens as James, a blind man who recovers his sight and immediately sets his sights on the horizon. The way he sees …
The first sign that The Boss Baby will be a pleasant surprise — and not simply an exercise in sticking Alec Baldwin’s Scotch-mellowed tycoon’s rasp in the mouth of a CGI infant and chuckling at …
Sometimes, life is kind. Not the movie Life, mind you. That wasn’t kind at all, even if it was kinda good. But real life. Your humble correspondent hit a serious low this week, so it’s …
The great grinding gears of the pop culture PR machine would have you believe that Beauty and the Beast is the big movie news this week. But it’s not, and neither are the bleats of …
Writer-director Martin Zandlivet’s terse, tense, and terrific post-WWII film Land of Mine establishes two of its three strengths immediately. First, star Roland Møller as Danish sergeant Carl Rasmussen, his eyes radiating barely controlled emotion from …
I liked the superhero movie Logan a lot, mostly because it was less about superheroes and more about keeping the flame of faith alive as the darkness closes in and about keeping civilization going by …
With 2013’s The Wolverine, director James Mangold took a near-immortal, adamantium-clawed (thanks to a combination of mutation and rogue science) superhero named Logan and stuck him in a Big Sleep–style mystery movie. The results were...unimpressive. …