Naked Singularity movie review: New York misery
A very good cast makes a valiant go of it, but a hugely ambitious experimental novel has been boiled down to a tepid mishmash of genres: social-justice drama + black-comedy heist + sci-fi mind-bender.
science fiction
Free Guy movie review: NPC ya later…
Messy sci-fi comedy, cheerful on the surface but nihilistic underneath, is utterly clueless about all the things it is almost about: AI, gaming, and the bread-and-circuses power of immersive worlds.
The Suicide Squad movie review: primrose psychopaths
Spanks the 2016 film and sends it off to the corner to think about what it did. This one is the definite article: Gory, grim, bleakly funny. Full of feverish, anarchic energy and exhausting cynicism.
Black Widow movie review: spy cruft
Dishearteningly less concerned with giving Natasha Romanoff her own story than with setting up her MCU replacement. Superfluous, backward-looking, its bit of feminism belabored. She deserved better.
A Quiet Place: Part II movie review: this one goes to 11
A marvel of a sequel that smartly avoids any attempt to recapture the original, instead expanding its world in every way possible. Brisk, crisp, efficient, and full of masterful sequences of suspense.
Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2021 (93rd Academy Awards) review
The brilliantly unsettling “Two Distant Strangers” is not only the most important of the nominees but one of the movies of the year, of any length. Its surprises are more brutal than mere plot twists.
Synchronic movie review: Benson and Moorhead would have voted for Obama twice if they could have…
Just because a tale is science fiction doesn’t mean that plausibility and cohesion are not required. Yet we can see the narrative strings pulling along the puppet-characters, and in an ugly direction.
Godzilla vs. Kong movie review: whole earth monster catalog
Everything a monster movie needs: Monsters, natch. Cute kids who Know Things. Nerdy-hot scientists. Spectacular sci-fi visions. Humor but no cheese. Warmth but no schmaltz. And a superb green message.
Tenet movie review: I have no time for it
Washington and Pattinson have palpable charisma, but this cold puzzle offers no incentive to solve it. Throw in damsel-in-distress crap, and both my geek sensibilities and my feminism are offended.
Songbird movie review: screechingly out of tune
An appalling melange of insipid disaster drama and implausible romance with a bit of dystopian satire thrown in. This is a crass cash-in meant to prey on our pandemic anxieties, not grapple with them.
