Papi Chulo movie review: can’t buy him love
An uncomfortably clueless portrait of societal privilege taking advantage of financial desperation. Matt Bomer is very effective as a man truly heartbroken, though.
LGBTQ+
Rocketman movie review: what makes a rock star, and what unmakes him
Joyful and rowdy, self-deprecating and vulnerable, absolutely electrifying as it deconstructs the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’-roll story. Taron Egerton is chills-inducingly good. Sheer cinematic magic.
XY Chelsea documentary review: the truth will out
Pensively melancholy, this jagged, humane portrait of US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is a massive challenge to the notion of soldiering as a good way for a lost young person to find oneself.
Trial by Fire and My Days of Mercy movies review: two (rare) new dramas about the US death penalty
Two very different films, replete with emotionally engaging performances, examine the impact of the American death penalty from the large-scale legal and political to that of intimate personal grief.
Wild Nights with Emily movie review: the poetess with the mostest
Like Drunk History but sober, a lively, arch, dryly comedic corrective to the traditional, heteronormative, patriarchal image of Emily Dickinson. Incredibly audacious and utterly delightful.
The White Crow movie review: nothing to crow about
Elegant but dull, and so subtle it’s downright diffuse. If you don’t know much about Rudolf Nureyev going in, you won’t know much coming out, either. Weirdly, it doesn’t even feature much dancing.
Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2019 (91st Academy Awards) review
My pick: Vincent Lambe’s controversial and profoundly harrowing “Detainment,” a dramatization of the real-life police interrogations of the 10-year-old boys who killed a toddler in England in 1993.
Nina movie review: dreary would-be sexual melodrama
Overlong and underwritten, tepid and dreary, this would-be sexual melodrama isn’t lurid enough to qualify as soft-core porn, but never finds any true emotion among its triangle of lovers, either.
Family in Transition documentary review: weathering change at home (Doc NYC 2018)
Frank and bittersweet, this is a quietly remarkable portrait of one father and husband’s gender transition, and how the family coped — and didn’t — with dramatic upheaval in the most intimate of settings: home.
Bohemian Rhapsody movie review: dynamite with a laser beam
Rami Malek brings warmth, humor, and a down-to-earth humanity to the larger-than-life Freddie Mercury. But it is the power of Queen’s music — the rousing good cheer, its sheer rock ’n’ roll joy — that fills up this pure brash entertainment.
