Black Widow movie review: spy cruft
Dishearteningly less concerned with giving Natasha Romanoff her own story than with setting up her MCU replacement. Superfluous, backward-looking, its bit of feminism belabored. She deserved better.
female protagonist
Zola movie review: speed bumps in the road trip
A deliciously badass style — part 70s grindhouse, part verité pseudo-documentary — and all-in performances are undermined by an exploitive gaze, and a combination of failed caper and failed satire.
Les nôtres movie review: sacrificing girls for the greater good
Quietly chilling. A condemnation of supposed propriety over genuine decency, and the sacrifice of children to the illusion of communal cohesion. There are no easy answers here, and no pat resolutions.
Sweat movie review: let’s get metaphysical
Nuanced, sensitive peek into the world of a social-media influencer, with a beautiful central performance. Uncynical and pragmatic about the seachange human society has endured in the 21st century.
In the Heights movie review: hot in the city
Pure joy. It is singing and dancing, life and love, food and family, heritage and community in all its complexity. Harnesses Golden Age Hollywood verve and style in breathtaking, enrapturing ways.
The Reason I Jump documentary review: the experience of being autistic
An extraordinary cinematic experience that immerses us into the personal landscapes of profoundly autistic, nonverbal young people. The empathy it engenders is deeply felt and enormously eye-opening.
Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer and A Crime on the Bayou documentaries review: Black history matters
Two new documentaries — one a shrewdly incisive work of journalism, the other a delicately elegant tale of injustice and friendship — tell all-but-forgotten histories of Black America. Of America.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard movie review: kill me quickly…
A movie to turn you off Going To The Movies, just as we are allowed to again, with its unlikeable characters, muddled action, and incomprehensible plot, all of which are magnified on the big screen.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It review: possessed innocent?
As credulous — or con-artist cheaty — as its demon-hunter protagonists, but lacking their charm. Worse, it can’t even be bothered to justify and satisfy the procedural approach to its mystery.
A Quiet Place: Part II movie review: this one goes to 11
A marvel of a sequel that smartly avoids any attempt to recapture the original, instead expanding its world in every way possible. Brisk, crisp, efficient, and full of masterful sequences of suspense.
