The White Crow movie review: nothing to crow about
Elegant but dull, and so subtle it’s downright diffuse. If you don’t know much about Rudolf Nureyev going in, you won’t know much coming out, either. Weirdly, it doesn’t even feature much dancing.
based on a book
Out of Blue movie review: murder most muted
A limp noodle of a cinematic noir that drains Patricia Clarkson of her usual eccentric charisma. And where it aims for intriguingly oblique pseudoscientific philosophizing, it ends up merely obtuse.
The Aftermath movie review: don’t mention the war…
Post WWII upheaval is a cheap backdrop to beautiful people getting it on. Characters and situations are undeveloped, and there’s little genuine romance here, and too much laughable preposterousness.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World movie review: dragon its feet to a blah finale
The gorgeous and once glorious fantasy series comes to a flat conclusion, one in which the stakes feel way lower than they should and the spark that once animated and elevated the story is missing.
If Beale Street Could Talk movie review: a velvet fist of love and strength
A beautiful story about ugliness, about dignity in the face of hatred, told via delicate yet steely performances that imbue it with a power at once tender and infuriating. Totally enrapturing.
Mary Queen of Scots movie review: not so good to be the queen…
Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie command the screen in this delicious anti costume drama with an earthy ethos, replete with movie-movie internecine spycraft and a sly, smart feminist parable that resonates for us today.
Mortal Engines movie review: it’s got no rev
Like the book it’s based on, the worldbuilding is intriguing, but the characters and story are strictly cliché. A lazy, confused, and derivative disaster, with plot points and visual and thematic motifs shamelessly stolen from far better movies.
Dumplin’ movie review: throwing her weight around
A lovely movie that warmly embraces a wide(ish) range of girls-and-women-as-people, one that doesn’t reduce its large heroine — the amazing Danielle Macdonald — to nothing more than her size. This should not feel so damn radical, but it is.
movies for the resistance: Schindler’s List
The devastating cultural experience Spielberg’s masterpiece presented to us 25 years ago felt then like a piece of history. Today, from the bowels of 2018, it feels like a warning, a premonition, a harbinger.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web movie review: an itsy-bitsy reboot
A rote crime action thriller — very car chase! such gunshots! — that drains its protagonist of much of the raw power that has made her so fascinating in the past.
