Logan movie review: wounded Wolverine, dangerous beast
The X-Men series — the entire superhero genre — has never seen a film like Logan before: raw, rageful, tormented, human. Best of the series yet.
drama
Patriots Day movie review: blurry portrait of a city
Unfocused like a 1970s cast-of-thousands disaster flick, and with little point beyond engaging in bland and easy propagandistic cheering. Boston deserves better.
Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts (89th Academy Awards) review
My favorite of the nominees is “Sing,” a movie for right-now with its pushback against a bullying authority figure and its gently effective defiance.
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (89th Academy Awards) review
My pick: “Pearl,” blending new VR tech with old-fashioned characters and emotions, demonstrating storytelling possibilities that are beginning to open up.
XX movie review: women filmmakers bring a feminine bent to horror
My anger that women filmmakers doing a horror anthology is seen as a novelty almost overshadows my disappointment that these short films aren’t very scary.
Fifty Shades Darker movie review: where is the fantasy?
Thank god this insult of a movie doesn’t try to fool us into believing that the controlling Christian Grey is appealing. That would be even more horrific…
The Salesman movie review: marriage, Iranian style
This delicately realized portrait of an intellectual Tehran couple could easily be taking place in New York, London, or Tokyo. The empathy machine strikes again.
Denial movie review: a film for the resistance
A terrific legal procedural about defending factual truth and smacking dishonest sowers of doubt. An essential film for our era of “alternative facts.”
The White King movie review: a boy’s-eye view on dystopia
This sad mess of a vaguely sci-fi coming-of-age tale seemingly could not be more plugged into current fears, and yet it feels utterly irrelevant.
Gold movie review: this mine is tapped out
Not a terrible excuse for entertainment, just very, very familiar, all paradigms that desperately require a shift, in Hollywood and in the real world.
