Miles Ahead movie review: where the music takes you
A fantasy about Miles Davis’s life and music; loose, free-flowing, a kind of cinematic jazz. An astonishingly assured directorial debut from Don Cheadle.
crime
Bastille Day (aka The Take) movie review: French toast
A fake movie busted out into reality! But this not-even would-be jokey riff on Hollywood doesn’t know how to fill the air between car chases and punchups.
The Syndrome documentary review: baby with the bathwater
A smartly dispassionate and skeptical look at “shaken baby syndrome,” and an accidental portrait about how science fails us when it solidifies into dogma.
The Keeper of Lost Causes (Kvinden i buret) and The Absent One (Fasandraeberne) movies review: good clean nasty Nordic noir
Grim treats, mining suspense and urgency from intensely plotted dual timelines of brutal criminality. A must for fans of rumpled, cynical, bitter detectives.
Sold movie review: the life of a child sex slave
Brutal yet sensitively rendered, putting a human face, if a fictional one, on an issue that rarely gets one. Almost Dickens for the 21st century.
True Story movie review: lies and the lying liars who tell them
The height of poor taste. Grants notorious men even more notoriety by giving voice to their inexcusable “travails,” thereby feeding their self-absorption.
Mojave movie rating: red light
A spoiled melancholy Hollywood brat and a menacing drifter engage in a deadly dick-measuring contest that you will hope neither survives.
Zootropolis (aka Zootopia) movie review: creature feature
Marvelous. A bouncy comedy mystery adventure parable in a fantasy world meticulously and cleverly conceived and gorgeously realized. I adore this movie.
Irrational Man movie review: the measure of a man’s midlife crisis
A blithe and chipper drawing-room comedy that, in a deliciously perverse way, plays with notions of chance and karma and very bitter irony.
Hot Pursuit movie review: nice rack and ruin
Spectacularly misogynist. Every single attempt at humor — all of which fail — comes from abusing and humiliating its central female characters as women.
