The Comedian (London Film Festival review)
Lends a fresh depth of honesty and intimacy to a story that feels familiar on the surface but has rarely been plumbed with such insight or candor.
LGBTQ+
Rock of Ages (review)
The story is almost beside the point, because Tom Cruise’s nude torso that I could be running my hands all over and because the young kittenish leads in this story cobbled together around awesome 80s hair-band stadium anthems are the weakest part of it.
She Monkeys (Apflickorna) (review)
I’m struggling to find reasons to do more than merely coolly appreciate, from an emotional distance, the disagreeably detached dissection of young girls’ sexuality on offer…
Pariah (review)
Writer-director Dee Rees, in an assured feature debut, expands on her award-winning 2007 short of the same name to tell a story all but ignored in pop culture: the coming out of a black teen lesbian.
J. Edgar (review)
If there’s one thing that comes across stridently and passionately from Clint Eastwood’s curiously blah biopic J. Edgar, it is this: Leonardo DiCaprio really wants an Oscar.
Weekend (review)
It’s meant to be terribly romantic how theses two sweet guys fall in love over the course of a few days. But something doesn’t feel quite right to me.
Black Swan (review)
I’m not entirely sure how much of what we see in Black Swan actually exists beyond the fevered imagination of the protagonist. And that perilous hold on reality is far from the only thing to love about this gorgeously horrific nightmare.
I Love You Phillip Morris (review)
Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa graduate to writer-directors here, and give us a warmly human and hugely funny story that’s almost a sendup of both prison melodramas and hetero romantic comedies… yet is also a truly amorous and very satisfying tale about the extremes to which a man will go for love.
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Luftslottet som sprängdes) (review)
Tough, smart, and competent, yet also wounded and searching: that Lisbeth Salander remains the riveting centerpiece of the two films that follow on from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but, alas, her continuing story has been winnowed down in a way that makes it — and her — feel smaller than before.
Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection (review)
If you’re not sure why it’s so awesome to see Helen Mirren unapologetically kicking ass in Red — and to see her doing so without getting grief for it from the guys — then perhaps you’ve never seen Prime Suspect, the British cop series she starred in through most of the past two decades.
