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.
suspense/thriller
Beirut (aka The Negotiator) movie review: an American man finds absolution in the messy Middle East
A same-old story of a white man’s angst, set against the “exotic” backdrop of 1980s war-torn Beirut. This brand of Hollywood myopia is tired, uninteresting, and no longer acceptable.
Truth or Dare movie review: it has none of either
Infinitely small, petty, cruel; appallingly sociopathic even grading on the dumpster-fire-horror-flick curve. But forget the supernatural element: the human “drama” is the most ridiculous thing here.
Custody (Jusqu’à la garde) movie review: family ties, slashered
Transforms a straightforward story of domestic violence into something like a horror movie, and it’s so harrowing and so incredibly tense that I’m not sure that it’s not exploitive.
The Hurricane Heist movie review: ’tis an ill wind that blows no minds
A peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate movie, this Die Hard meets Twister monster is so ludicrous it comes all the way back around to being awesome and hilarious.
A Quiet Place movie review: hushed horror
An apocalypse unlike any onscreen before. A film often almost unbearably tense, in part because it audaciously reconsiders the role sound plays in eliciting our emotional response.
Ready Player One movie review: trivial pursuit*
A nightmare of nothingness, of empty, soulless wankery, that serves only to reassure male dorks that their pop-culture obsessions make them special, and will make cute girls like them.
Prodigy movie review: little girl lost
This low-budget science-fiction film has an ambition that exceeds its reach, and has nothing to surprise the self-respecting geek a movie like this one is aimed at.
Unsane movie review: is she or isn’t she?
As a piece of craft, this is a smack in the face to Hollywood’s bloated blockbusters. As a piece of pulp, it brings a sharp, smart feminist twist to familiar tropes of cinematic paranoia.
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.
