Beast movie review: a monstrous love
Electrifying and genre-busting, this romantic mystery thriller toys with our expectations and plays with ambiguity. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn are mesmerizing separately and explosive together.
mystery
Red Sparrow movie review: undercovers agent
Ballerina turned whore-spy? This is like a cheap porn scenario, and the Hollywood gloss makes it worse. Risible yet tedious, yet another movie by men that thinks it’s critiquing misogyny yet is indistinguishable from it.
The Commuter movie review: on the wrong track
A lazy, insulting xerox of better movies about Liam Neeson growling into cell phones at enigmatic villains. Devoid of tension and mystery, and rife with plotholes that derail the trip.
Murder on the Orient Express movie review: strangers on a train
Doubly dated, lacking in humor and subtext, its impressive cast deliberately underutilized, this is little more than an exercise in gorgeous production design.
#LFF2017: Blade of the Immortal, Gemini, Makala
Quick takes from the now-wrapped 61st London Film Festival.
Unlocked movie review: the spy who broke the female mold
There’s stuff in this spy thriller that’s fresh, and lots that’s familiar, but Noomi Rapace using her brains and brawn to fight bad guys is a genuine thrill.
Mindhorn movie review: fame and fatuity
A wonderfully silly sendup of fandom and nostalgia… and an absolutely hilarious smackdown of actorly pomposity and delusions of celebrity grandeur.
The Handmaiden movie review: the women pushing back against misogyny, thwarted by their own film
The intrigue, shifting alliances, and twisted revenge? Delicious, pulpy fun. The male-gazey soft-core porn that undermines the female protagonists? Not so much.
City of Tiny Lights movie review: mushy modern noir
Doesn’t hit all the noir tropes so much as it wrings all the gloomy joy from them, and the mystery is underwhelming and unmysterious, but still: Riz Ahmed.
Ghost in the Shell movie review: more like ghost in the meh-chine
Trite characters, very well-worn clichés of SF cinema, and a mystery that is completely transparent. All about production design, and even that is familiar.
