Blancanieves review: silent style
A valentine to early filmmaking, this silent-movie pastiche is gorgeous, lush, and bursting with passion. It presents a familiar fairy tale with a wondrous air of freshness and newfound intimacy.
female protagonist
Mama movie review
Ultimately more sad than scary in ways that are about the power, for both good and ill, of parental love…
Zero Dark Thirty movie review
If only this were a wholly fictional story, I could get behind it 100 percent, instead of the 95 percent I can give.
Wadjda (London Film Festival review)
Delightful and powerfully satisfying, an arthouse crowd-pleaser about a charmingly irrepressible protagonist… (new DVD/VOD UK)
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World movie review: deep impact
The heightened emotions and outrageous urgency of rom-coms are actually appropriate here. All the absurdities that define the genre — not accidentally but deliberately — suddenly work in its favor.
Safe movie review: New York noir
A viciously cynical dark fantasy that fashions a new mythos of post-9/11 New York, a bleak but plausible world of the Russian mob, the Chinese Triads, and the NYPD as another gang vying for supremacy.
The Cabin in the Woods movie review: the end of horror
I don’t know how anyone can possibly make a horror movie again. This absolutely genius movie renders all past and future examples of the genre superfluous.
Martha Marcy May Marlene movie review: occupy victimhood
It takes an extraordinary film to turn the notion of woman-as-victim on its head… and an even more extraordinary film if it does posit as its central conceit that its protagonist has unquestionably been victimized.
Monsters movie review
“Sunny with a chance of creatures” could well be the weather report from this world, one not too far removed from our own, in one of the most startling movies of our new DIY filmmaking culture.
Agora movie review: condemned to repeat it
Once upon a time, a film this epic, this relevant, this emotional would have been celebrated as a great entertainment and important storytelling with something vital to say about the world today.
