21 Bridges movie review: roads to nowhere
Bland, predictable cop and crime clichés lacking all urgency and any of the claustrophobia that should come from its high-concept premise. Shutting down Manhattan has zero impact on anything here.
drama
Radioflash movie review: it’s got no juice
Inept post-EMP survival thriller is no more thrilling than it is plausible, and inexcusably casts its resourceful teen heroine as a victim constantly at the mercy of others and in need of rescuing.
The Good Liar movie review: mangled web
We expect a film about a con man to con us, but it’s not fun here: it’s absurd. This limp thriller might fancy itself smart, sharp, twisty, and probably feminist, but it just made me groan out loud.
Le Mans ’66 (aka Ford v Ferrari) movie review: when “circle back” meant something else in corporatespeak
A winning (if overearnest) depiction of manly friendship, with some pretty thrilling (if only technically so) racing stuff. But it doesn’t see its potential to be actually culturally significant.
Doctor Sleep movie review: a reckoning with the ghosts of the past
A wonderfully unexpected sort of horror movie, beautiful and delicate, but unsettling, too, with an authentic plausibility to the dichotomy between the invented uncanny and the human response to it.
Harriet movie review: a true American hero finally gets her due (LFF 2019)
Tubman’s heroics are excellent movie-movie fodder. This “origin story” embraces her towering legend and her profound symbolic power, finally sliding her into the epic American pop-culture narrative.
The Current War movie review: fathers of invention, in conflict
An electrifying style lights up this geek adventure of the intersections between science, culture, and capitalism in the 19th-century battle to power our world. Cumberbatch and Shannon are brilliant.
Joker movie review: sad clown, bad clown, not at all a rad clown
Not fit to lick the boots of Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan, though the height of its ambition appears to be its desperation to do so. A movie as pathetically ineffectual as its protagonist.
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.
Official Secrets movie review: blow all the whistles
Not a spy thriller but a story of emotional and intellectual suspense wrangling with matters of patriotism and of conscience, and of just how far journalism’s watchdog role can and should take it.
