Naked Singularity movie review: New York misery
A very good cast makes a valiant go of it, but a hugely ambitious experimental novel has been boiled down to a tepid mishmash of genres: social-justice drama + black-comedy heist + sci-fi mind-bender.
question of the weekend: What under-the-radar film from recent years would you recommend?
I’m thinking specifically about movies you wish more people had seen so that we — the big cultural We — could talk about it. Or even just so that you could talk to other movie fans about it.
Free Guy movie review: NPC ya later…
Messy sci-fi comedy, cheerful on the surface but nihilistic underneath, is utterly clueless about all the things it is almost about: AI, gaming, and the bread-and-circuses power of immersive worlds.
question of the weekend: what movie would you delete the dialogue from so you could just enjoy the visuals and music?
This might be a movie you love and want to experience on a different level. Or it might be one that would only be improved if you could delete the dialogue. (My choice is one of the latter…)
Riders of Justice and Pig movies review: rethinking the revenge movie
Two brilliant dramas upend cinematic tropes of male vengeance with precision, patience, and grim humor. These are radical rethinks in emotional maturity surrounding men’s grief, remorse, and shame.
curated: “Loki as Other: Why Do Queer and Female Viewers Love the Trickster?”
E.J. Beaton has written a fabulous thing at Tor.com about the appeal of Loki, particular as portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Tom Hiddleston, and even more particularly as he is depicted in the Disney+ series Loki…
The Suicide Squad movie review: primrose psychopaths
Spanks the 2016 film and sends it off to the corner to think about what it did. This one is the definite article: Gory, grim, bleakly funny. Full of feverish, anarchic energy and exhausting cynicism.
curated: “Arctic thriller’s film crew struggled to find true frozen waste”
Soon we will see ice and snow only if it is CGI’d into science fiction movies, or ones with historical settings.
question of the weekend: what place that exists only in a movie would you like to visit?
Movies are fantasy factories, creating places that do not exist in the real world: settings so hugely imaginative that they could not possibly exist, and settings that could conceivable exist, yet don’t.
Jungle Cruise movie review: raiders of the recent swashbucklers
Wonderfully escapist, dripping with magnificently congenial charm thanks to the comic chemistry of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. Plus it’s sure to enrage people who use “woke” as an insult. Yay!
