Serenity movie review: gonna need a bigger nope
Accidental hilarity turns ugly in this baffling exercise in genre-hopping that thinks it justifies its Hollywood-typical adolescent-boy attitudes about women, sex, violence, and morality. It does not.
drama
Capernaum movie review: a child’s real-life horror
Harrowing and heartbreaking, a nightmare dystopia that could almost be a documentary. This tough but essential film slyly asks us to consider what we owe children, not just our own but the world’s.
Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2019 (91st Academy Awards) review
My pick: Vincent Lambe’s controversial and profoundly harrowing “Detainment,” a dramatization of the real-life police interrogations of the 10-year-old boys who killed a toddler in England in 1993.
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2019 (91st Academy Awards) review
My pick: The animated short of the year surely must be Domee Shi’s “Bao,” a bittersweet reverie on motherhood that features one of the most hilariously shocking moments onscreen this year.
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.
Burning (Beoning) movie review: same old Mr Nice Guy
Oh hey it’s The Nice Guy’s Complaint done up arthouse style, meant to render male entitlement, unwarranted sexual jealousy, and personal ineffectualness as something deep and meaningful. It’s not.
The Mule movie review: the old man and the drugs
Welcome to Peak Apologetics for the Bullshit of White Men, replete with many appalling messages about their endless entitlement to redemption and forgiveness. And as a bonus, it’s racist and sexist.
Nina movie review: dreary would-be sexual melodrama
Overlong and underwritten, tepid and dreary, this would-be sexual melodrama isn’t lurid enough to qualify as soft-core porn, but never finds any true emotion among its triangle of lovers, either.
Glass movie review: superhero ’splaining
Earnest and humorless, this is a faux-intellectual Comic Book Guy ponderously well-actually-ing us about shallow superhero tropes and clichés as if those are the most intriguing bits of these stories.
Destroyer movie review: holding out for an antiheroine
Nicole Kidman’s pitiless performance completely upends genre expectations in Karyn Kusama’s tense, grim crime noir. Uncompromising and subtly challenging, like a cerebral itch you can’t quite scratch.
