Greyhound movie review: Tom Hanks goes a-LARPing
How very kind of Tom Hanks to lend his gravitas and inescapable likability to a bunch of WWII naval reenactors on their weekend-getaway “crossing the north Atlantic in 1942 dodging U-boats” campaign.
drama
The Old Guard movie review: saving the world, one century at a time
There’s plenty of bruising action, but this fantastic slice of comic-book pulp emphasizes the humanity of its immortal heroes. Gina Prince-Bythewood elevates the familiar with emotional authenticity.
Family Romance, LLC. movie review: coming to your emotional rescue
A marvelously strange and perplexing meta meditation on human connection and ritual, on fact and fiction, on emotional truth. An existential cinematic rabbit hole as only Werner Herzog can deliver.
Fanny Lye Deliver’d (aka The Delivered) movie review: birth of the modern woman (EIFF 2020)
Maxine Peake is stupendous in this deliciously audacious period horror, ambitious in emotional scope and with monsters who feel unexpectedly modern: men who wield religion as a tool of oppression.
The Last Tree movie review: boy interrupted
An astonishingly beautiful coming-of-age story of startling specificity and intense intimacy, yet universal in its compassionate depiction of a child’s perspective dawning on mature self-awareness.
Miss Juneteenth movie review: ordinary lives drawn with extraordinary grace
A beautiful cinematic experience, delicately subtle and bursting with a gorgeous sense of place and character. There is wonderful intimate suspense in every moment of Nicole Beharie’s performance.
7500 movie review: never your in-flight movie
Mundanity builds to almost unbearable tension, but this isn’t an action movie. It’s a drama grounded in emotional realism thanks to the Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s intense empathy and vulnerable humanity.
Shirley movie review: lost girls gone mad
A beautiful-ugly film, a work of domestic gothic grotesquerie, of women’s suffocation and sacrifice, pain and isolation. Elisabeth Moss’s performance is next-level glorious in its wackadoo intensity.
The Vast of Night movie review: and vast of perspective
Striking sci-fi mood piece, all eeriness and ookiness, wonder and dread. Explicitly Twilight Zone–esque, summoning a midcentury-America innocence in order to shatter its narrowness (and our own).
Inheritance movie review: ill fortune
Nothing works in this ludicrous thriller, which fails to compel us with its roster of monstrous characters. Lily Collins is woefully miscast; Patrick Warburton and Simon Pegg are criminally wasted.
