Dune movie review: dreams of alien worlds (#HBOMax)
Monumental. Villeneuve tells a familiar story with uncommon elegance and pensiveness, even dreaminess, on a breathtaking scale. A stunningly gorgeous, supremely dignified movie about ugly things.
war/antiwar
The Card Counter movie review: unnatural stillness at the center of the storm
Grim, mysterious, and unsettling, never more so than when it is quiet and still. But a brutality lurks below its calm, slick surface. Oscar Isaac’s performance is a work of astonishing minimalism.
Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts 2021 (93rd Academy Awards) review
“Hunger Ward,” an unvarnished vérité look at starving Yemeni children and the medics trying to save them, best encapsulates the human experience of pain and resilience that all the nominees embody.
Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2021 (93rd Academy Awards) review
I don’t see how the astonishing “Opera,” by Erick Oh, doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Animated Short. This is a stupendous achievement, a cartoon clockwork depicting life, the universe, and everything.
Raya and the Last Dragon movie review: warrior princess (#DisneyPlus)
The Disney paradigm is hard at play again here, its familiarity offset by its inspiration in Southeast Asian culture and mythology. Sweepingly told, gorgeously animated, and audaciously optimistic.
African Apocalypse documentary review: Black perspectives matter (#LFF2020)
In an intimate yet shattering documentary, Black British activist Femi Nylander searches for “the imperial history they didn’t teach at school,” and finds it. Heartbreaking, provocative, illuminating.
Mulan (2020) movie review: girl (and film) at war with the world (#DisneyPlus)
Acceptably inoffensive, if less than wholly engaging. At least Liu’s strong, stately Mulan is a wonderful role model for girls who aren’t much interested in conformity and adhering to expectations.
Greyhound movie review: Tom Hanks goes a-LARPing (#AppleTVPlus)
How very kind of Tom Hanks to lend his gravitas and inescapable likability to a bunch of WWII naval reenactors on their weekend-getaway “crossing the north Atlantic in 1942 dodging U-boats” campaign.
Trolls: World Tour movie review: a cinematic Rubicon by dint of pandemic coincidence
As pastel and glittery as its predecessor, with a silliness more glorious and less forced. Sweet, smart, sincere… but it doesn’t deserve to be carrying the future of movies on its little shoulders.
Military Wives movie review: tired choir dramedy needs to change the tune
So aggressively precisely what you think it is that there’s almost no point in seeing it. Flattens a true story into generic pap that isn’t even that successfully, authentically feel-good, either.
