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.
suspense/thriller
Avengers: Endgame movie review: with a bang *and* a whimper
A miraculous blend of grief and humor. Big, bold, brash, then sneakily meta. I am only starting to get my head around the emotional and creative right-hook of it. A fitting end (for now) to the MCU.
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.
The White Crow movie review: nothing to crow about
Elegant but dull, and so subtle it’s downright diffuse. If you don’t know much about Rudolf Nureyev going in, you won’t know much coming out, either. Weirdly, it doesn’t even feature much dancing.
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.
Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) movie review: weak wedding whodunnit
Asghar Farhadi attempts to meld melodramatic mystery with his usual humanistic drama, but leaves little space for either impulse to be satisfied. Disappointing and strangely anticlimactic.
Serenity movie review: gonna need a bigger nope
Accidental hilarity turns ugly in this baffling exercise in genre-hopping that thinks it justifies its Hollywood-typical adolescent-boy attitudes about women, sex, violence, and morality. It does not.
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.
Cold Pursuit movie review: hot mess
The latest Liam Neeson revenge fantasy simply makes no sense even before you get to the tedious action, undeveloped characters, and stubborn racism and sexism. A rancid excuse for a thriller.
Burning (Beoning) movie review: same old Mr Nice Guy
Oh hey it’s The Nice Guy’s Complaint done up arthouse style, meant to render male entitlement, unwarranted sexual jealousy, and personal ineffectualness as something deep and meaningful. It’s not.
