Austenland review: bomb and bombasticity
Austenland, allow me to tell you how ardently I loathe and despise you.
female protagonist
Inch’Allah movie review: it’s not all about us
The striking story of a Western doctor in Palestine and her long, hard path to the realization that all of her good intentions can barely begin to counter the tidal wave of history she has chosen to surf.
Frances Ha review: girl uninterrupted
Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have carved out, with effortless elegance and ease, a cinematic space for a woman to be, unapologetically, herself.
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.
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.
