Hail Satan? documentary review: the devil you say
Hilarious, provocative look at the wonderfully profane rebels of the culture wars who, with tongue in cheek but seriously, too, are trolling fundie-Christian America with their delicious blasphemies.
female protagonist
Red Joan movie review: it doesn’t bomb, but it fizzles
There’s a lot of hot-button stuff going on in this A-bomb spy drama — politics, sexism, scientific ethics — but it’s all surprisingly inert, given the literal fate-of-the-world stakes.
Dagenham movie review: lost in London
There isn’t a likeable character in this parade of misery, nor even an intriguingly unlikeable one. An unfocused, random plot merely cuts through a messy ensemble of criminal working-class Londoners.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché documentary review: the movie pioneer you’ve never heard of
Not only a portrait of the woman who made more than a thousand of the very first films, but a mystery detective story about how the achievements of a trailblazing woman were erased, and found again.
Nervous Translation movie review: home alone, with only her imagination for company
Shireen Seno’s portrait of a remarkably imaginative and self-contained child at a specifically 1980s Filipino moment is full of both charming whimsy and a delicately observed, melancholy universality.
Wild Nights with Emily movie review: the poetess with the mostest
Like Drunk History but sober, a lively, arch, dryly comedic corrective to the traditional, heteronormative, patriarchal image of Emily Dickinson. Incredibly audacious and utterly delightful.
Little movie review: small and slight indeed
Bullying tech CEO is cursed to revert to powerless kid-dom. The limp, desperate comedy that follows never figures out who its audience is and is often unintentionally obnoxious and disturbing.
Blowin’ Up documentary review: women getting shit done
A fly-on-the-wall peek into a court in New York City where women work to help other women with realistic solutions to complicated problems. A wonderful ode to creative and compassionate thinking.
Dumbo (2019) movie review: you will not believe an elephant can fly
The most soulless of the live-action Disney remakes yet, weighted down by too many blah characters, too much convoluted plot, unconvincing CGI, and a message that doesn’t say what it thinks it does.
Out of Blue movie review: murder most muted
A limp noodle of a cinematic noir that drains Patricia Clarkson of her usual eccentric charisma. And where it aims for intriguingly oblique pseudoscientific philosophizing, it ends up merely obtuse.
