
Great Expectations (London Film Festival review)
I love it when a film that is “supposed” to be all stuffy and classic turns out to be this electric and alive…

I love it when a film that is “supposed” to be all stuffy and classic turns out to be this electric and alive…
Socialism as cool and sexy and radical? Is this a fantasy realm? No, it’s 250 years ago.
If you didn’t know that Jack Kerouac’s novel was a seminal influence on postwar America, you would never, ever guess it from this lifeless, soulless, pointless adaptation.

Insanely grand… My god, I love this movie. It’s every movie. It’s the ultimate movie.
I was literally in tears for parts of Argo, a purely physical reaction, not an emotional one, to deal with the tension. The only other option would have been to moan out loud, the film is almost that unbearably nerve-wracking.
Two separate tales of FDR that are certainly worthy of in-depth explorations on their own are mashed together in a way that is ridiculous and which gives both of them a short shift that neither deserves.
Elegant looking and well intentioned, but epically bloated and choking on its own would-be grand metaphor…
Breezy, witty, gently naughty. Hello, steampunk orgasm!
There is no pretense that we’re getting a realistic depiction of late-19th-century Russia. Director Joe Wright isn’t merely crafting a metaphor about the social structures under which we all live: he’s underscoring the artificiality of cinema itself.
An outsider’s look at a unique moment in American history, the gigantic failed social experiment of Prohibition: withering yet hugely engaging and ringing with unspoken critical parallels with today’s “war on drugs.”