Brightburn movie review: villainy, celebrated
Superman, but he’s evil. That’s the whole movie. This is a depiction of violent entitled sociopathy that may think it’s critiquing toxic masculinity yet is indistinguishable from a celebration of it.
horror
Ma movie review: revenge is sour
A bargain-bin cockadoodie pseudo-Misery, a disgraceful waste of the brilliant Octavia Spencer. Has no interest in women’s pain and trauma even as it appropriates it for entertainment purposes.
The Silence movie review: I have only the faintest of muted praise
Not a knockoff of that other quiet horror flick, though this familiar monster movie works hard to convince otherwise. But the terrific cast makes it worth a look, at least for Netflix subscribers.
Greta movie review: twisted sisterhood
Complete nonsense, and not in a good way, with an enraging side dish of male undercutting of women’s friendships. For a movie to be both this ludicrous and this predictable is quite an achievement.
Hellboy (2019) movie review: boy, this is hell
Bounces from one preposterous setpiece to another across an inexcusably flavorless magical, monstrous world, and borderline incoherent as it races through the plots of half a dozen different films.
Pet Sematary (2019) movie review: bad things happen when you leave the city
A lazy adaptation of the Stephen King novel, manipulatively cheap when it isn’t provoking eye-rolls at its genre banalities. Why can’t someone find the right role for the charismatic Jason Clarke?
The Brink documentary review: a nasty piece of work
I feared a portrait of human dumpster fire Steve Bannon would humanize him, but he’s beyond that. Can we use this inside look at his political and cultural manipulations to stop his fomenting of hate?
Us movie review: a new kind of horror for a newly precarious world
An anxious moan, a looming disquiet of a reckoning coming for America. This is horror as weird, funny, damning, and more disconcerting the more you think about it, finding fear right in front of us.
Doctor Who: “Logopolis” Fathom Event review: it’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for
An iconic story from the classic era of the British cult TV favorite comes to US big screens for one night only… and the cleaned-up FX as well as its deceptively simple tale hold up rather well.
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.
