Sweat movie review: let’s get metaphysical
Nuanced, sensitive peek into the world of a social-media influencer, with a beautiful central performance. Uncynical and pragmatic about the seachange human society has endured in the 21st century.
In the Heights movie review: hot in the city
Pure joy. It is singing and dancing, life and love, food and family, heritage and community in all its complexity. Harnesses Golden Age Hollywood verve and style in breathtaking, enrapturing ways.
curated: “in defence of historical inaccuracy,” particularly re colorblind casting
If you’re okay with certain ambiguities and artistic licenses in historical depictions but not others, maybe take a look at which ones bother you. Why are some facts more acceptably malleable than others, and what value do you find in which bendings of the “truth”?
The Reason I Jump documentary review: the experience of being autistic
An extraordinary cinematic experience that immerses us into the personal landscapes of profoundly autistic, nonverbal young people. The empathy it engenders is deeply felt and enormously eye-opening.
Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer and A Crime on the Bayou documentaries review: Black history matters
Two new documentaries — one a shrewdly incisive work of journalism, the other a delicately elegant tale of injustice and friendship — tell all-but-forgotten histories of Black America. Of America.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard movie review: kill me quickly…
A movie to turn you off Going To The Movies, just as we are allowed to again, with its unlikeable characters, muddled action, and incomprehensible plot, all of which are magnified on the big screen.
AWFJ Presents… a collection of amazing movies by (and about) women
I’m very excited by this project! I can heartily recommend two of the six films — A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Mustang — and I am going to take this opportunity to catch up with the other four.
Infinite movie review: whoa no
Knee-jerk clichés abound in a shameless retread of The Matrix in which many levels of storytelling ineptitude are the only depth on offer. Can Hollywood please stop reincarnating the same old movies?
curated: why so much movie criticism, and the movies themselves, are so awful these days
“[T]he denial of mythos is everywhere in our culture, and it can partially explain why so much of our approach to everything artistic, challenging, or mysterious seems reductive, dull, and unimaginative….”
I am — tentatively — returning to cinemas
It was not a decision I made easily or lightly, to go back to movie theaters again, and to start reviewing only-in-cinemas movies again. And it’s a decision that I may yet rescind, if our curse of a pandemic decides to get really ugly again.
