Game Night movie review: triumph of the nerds
Absolutely hilarious, full of smart snarksters, comedic suspense, and gleeful smashing of action-movie clichés. Part screwball comedy, part romantic adventure, all pure movie-movie joy.
adventure
Basmati Blues movie review: like white savior on rice
Part hamfisted critique of Big Ag, part strained romantic comedy, and part insipid musical that’s not much like the Bollywood tribute it’s meant to be. An accidental parody of itself.
The Mercy movie review: a sea of troubles
An unsettling true story smartly told, from a moment in time at once uniquely its own and a harbinger of things to come. Colin Firth is subtle, unflinching, extraordinary.
Early Man movie review: primordial goop
A huge disappointment, crude and simple compared to Aardman’s earlier, more sophisticated and multilayered work. No satire or subversion, just a bog-standard triumph-of-the-underdog story.
12 Strong movie review: America enters the “graveyard of empires”
Tense but never sensationalized action adventure about the first post–9/11 US foray into Afghanistan, an extraordinary culture clash and mashup of medieval and modern technologies.
Please Stand By movie review: fan trek
A lovely, gentle geek adventure that appreciates the importance of fandom as a source of inspiration and comfort, with a subtle and resolutely unsentimental performance by Dakota Fanning as an autistic fan.
Maze Runner: The Death Cure movie review: cute boys at the end of the world
The Auto-Tuned boy-band version of the apocalypse. You will forgive that every plot point that isn’t a cliché is in fact a plot hole because the hero is so dreamy and impossibly perfect, right?
Attraction (Prityazhenie) movie review: when ET is dreamy
It has a spectacular opening sequence, and features a few minor tweaks to alien-invasion tropes. But the teen romance at its center reduces this to a very inconsequential first contact.
Hostiles movie review: white man’s burden
Sure, millions of Native people dead and ancient cultures destroyed, but who has to live with that? All the good soldiers who were just following orders, that’s who. Won’t someone think of the white man?
Downsizing movie review: let’s get small (LFF 2017)
Absolutely stupendous: smart, funny, poignant, a true original. A thrilling odyssey of ideas that takes its sci-fi concept to the very edges of extrapolation.
