Cyrano movie review: out of tune
Peter Dinklage is wonderful, but this feels like a suggestion of a movie, not an actual one. It’s not romantic; there’s no humor, no absurdity. Its unpleasantness is as puzzling as it is inescapable.
based on a play
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.
One Night in Miami… movie review: the past, still prologue
An electrifying philosophical fantasia that imagines four towering figures of 1960s America arguing over how to navigate racism as Black men. Enraging, but also thrilling, bursting with cinematic joy.
The Father movie review: the quiet horror of Alzheimer’s
A deeply compassionate, deeply unnerving portrait of a man suffering from dementia and losing his grip on reality. The empathy machine of cinema has rarely been put to such uncomfortably intimate use.
Mouthpiece movie review: women, arguing with ourselves
The internal monologue that modern women have with ourselves gets externalized in this audacious and absolutely brilliant dramedy. Poignant, vulnerable, and almost shocking, in the best possible way.
Luce movie review: whom to believe, and what that says about us
Intense, uncomfortable family drama morphs into psychological suspense in a challenging tale of racial and cultural identity eliding the biases and delusions of its characters with the viewer’s own.
A Kid Like Jake movie review: the kid is all right; the parents are freaking out
A movie as generous and as nonjudgmental as its protagonists, as frustrated yet as gently questing as they are. Claire Danes and Jim Parsons are extraordinary.
Ghost Stories movie review: hasn’t got boo to say
Not an anthology of complete short tales but the highlights from much longer stories only briefly sketched and left maddeningly unfinished. Barely a movie at all, more a tease of one.
#Raindance2017: In Another Life, Hello Again, Maya Dardel
Quick takes from the 25th Raindance Film Festival, with public screenings in London through October 1st, 2017.
Chi-Raq movie review: sex as a weapon of peace
Furious, funny, and deadly serious, this is an audacious, searing satire that swells into a raw, electrifying fantasy about how we might put aside savagery.
