Scrapper movie review: girlhood interrupted
A singular portrait of a girl full of verve and personality. An astonishing feature debut from Charlotte Regan, with a film as cheeky and imaginative, as pleasantly messy and chaotic, as its heroine.
female protagonist
Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) movie review: healing after horror
A deeply humane, delicately constructed journey through trauma and recovery that cuts like a knife and soothes like a hug, somehow, miraculously, managing both bundles of feeling at the same time.
Mavka: The Forest Song movie review: the dark of the woods comes too late
Traditional folk music and beautifully animated mythic motifs may be rightfully validating for homegrown Ukrainian audiences, but there’s little else beyond that novelty to capture others’ imagination.
What’s Love Got to Do with It? movie review: the boy next door, and a world away
Lily James and Shazad Latif? Delightful, even when they’re not together and sparking. No surprise where they’re going, but this amiable rom-com gets them there with genuine smarts and real sentiment.
Rare Objects movie review: broken things, on the mend
It’s overstuffed and often jarring. But it’s also honest and unassuming, never insipid or sentimental, with a rough power, a generous spirit, and performances that are warm, wise, and perceptive.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline movie review: it means the earth to them
A heist drama, incendiary and intense, with planetary stakes. These young people are desperate, with nothing to lose, and everyone older than them made them this way. Nihilism is their only optimism.
Full Time (À plein temps) movie review: mother of invention
This relentless, heart-in-your-throat, ticking-clock thriller about precarious single-motherhood could not be more timely or more intimate. As real, and as recognizably stressful, as the genre gets.
Blue Jean movie review: cowardice and bravery as matters of survival
A powerful, necessary film, deeply humane and sympathetic, ugly-beautiful in its panic, full of dread and bad behavior. We feel every iota of Jean’s anxiety at closeted life in the homophobic 1980s.
Violent Night movie review: ho ho holy shit
Many movies have attempted to replicate the festive insouciant brutality of Die Hard. No movie has come closer to this lofty goal than this dementedly delicious nightmare before Christmas.
Avatar: The Way of Water movie review: blueface on a blue planet
The filmmaking craft may be (mostly) astonishing. But the craft must always — always — be in aid of a compelling story populated by compelling characters… and that’s not so much the case here.
