2015 Sundance Film Festival Award-Winning Shorts review: the best of the best
The highlight is the absolutely astonishing “World of Tomorrow,” which crams in more SF ideas than you’ll find in a decade’s worth of summer blockbusters.
girls/women
Insidious: Chapter 3 and We Are Still Here movie(s) review: gray horror
An unlikely duo of films in which folks way beyond their teens fight hauntings injects a bit of the unexpected into a genre now tediously predictable.
Second Coming movie review: mother of all pregnancies
Leaves no doubt that its central supernatural event is 100% real, yet it makes absolutely no case for it whatsoever, and refuses to even engage with it.
Spy movie review: the other gals
Does some wonderfully seditious feminist things while also being funny as hell. Finally, we are asked to laugh with Melissa McCarthy, not at her.
Man Up movie review: lie cute
I hate movies like this, in which it’s meant to be adorable when people lie in the name of love. And I particularly hate what this movie does to Lake Bell.
Strange Magic movie review: bad spell
Apparently this was inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it has about as much in common with that as Burger King does with Macbeth.
Tomorrowland (aka Tomorrowland: A World Beyond) movie review: back to the future
It gets a tad heavy-handed, but my eyes welled with tears of geeky joy at the film’s embrace of an optimism it steadfastly refuses to see as old-fashioned.
Return to Sender movie review: yes, return to sender
For almost the entire running time of this movie, we have no idea what it is about. What is it trying to say? What sort of story is it trying to tell?
Every Secret Thing movie review: skeletons in the heart
A slow burn mystery in which the secrets aren’t so much about the crimes it explores but truths of women’s emotional lives that are too often ignored.
A Royal Night Out movie review: princess hijinks
A bit of House of Windsor fan fiction: cute but slight, though the re-creation of London’s citywide VE Day celebrations is kind of amazing.
