Game Night movie review: triumph of the nerds
Absolutely hilarious, full of smart snarksters, comedic suspense, and gleeful smashing of action-movie clichés. Part screwball comedy, part romantic adventure, all pure movie-movie joy.
romantic comedy
Brakes movie review: when romance comes crashing down
This ultra-low-budget indie uses its own rough edges to great effect in its skewering of the happily-ever-after rom-com fantasy. Bleak, brutal, absurd, and painfully realistic.
Basmati Blues movie review: like white savior on rice
Part hamfisted critique of Big Ag, part strained romantic comedy, and part insipid musical that’s not much like the Bollywood tribute it’s meant to be. An accidental parody of itself.
Home Again movie review: imitation of life
Precious, fatuous, Nancy Meyers–lite rom-com about a privileged rich white lady with no real problems who can’t help but mom her much-younger new boyfriend. Barf.
The Big Sick movie review: girlfriend in a coma, the rom-com
A rom-com for people who hate rom-coms. A painfully funny movie, full of enrapturing emotion that captures the glorious contradictions of all kinds of love.
Lost in Paris (Paris pieds nus) movie review: French kicks
An exquisite miniature puzzle-box pop-up-book of a movie. All is color and light and exhilaration here, a fantastical lark that is sheer mischievous joy.
The Wedding Invitation movie review: regrets only
This strained comedy might have been progressive in the 1960s, but today it reeks of an infantilization of women that warrants squashing, not celebrating.
Finding Fatimah movie review: dating while Muslim
There’s lots to like in this mostly sweet British Muslim rom-com. Pity, then, that it tries too hard, instead of trusting its characters, and sabotages itself.
Bridget Jones’s Baby movie review: how to infantilize women
The desperation, the neuroticism, and the idiocy of Bridget Jones continues to be appalling, not appealing. She is not the everywoman she is meant to be.
The Mermaid (Mei ren yu) movie review: the biggest movie on the planet you haven’t heard of
A wacky fantasy lark, half screwball comedy, half Looney Tunes. Chinese audiences have thrown half a billion dollars at it. Prepare for Hollywood imitators.
