Aquaman movie review: deep blah sea
When it’s not tediously predictable in its clichés, its complete lack of narrative or thematic daring, and its colorless meathead hero, it’s a mess of incoherent action and noisy psychedelic chaos.
war/antiwar
Mortal Engines movie review: it’s got no rev
Like the book it’s based on, the worldbuilding is intriguing, but the characters and story are strictly cliché. A lazy, confused, and derivative disaster, with plot points and visual and thematic motifs shamelessly stolen from far better movies.
movies for the resistance: Schindler’s List
The devastating cultural experience Spielberg’s masterpiece presented to us 25 years ago felt then like a piece of history. Today, from the bowels of 2018, it feels like a warning, a premonition, a harbinger.
Under the Wire documentary review: journalists under fire in Syria
A harrowing portrait of the slaughter of civilians and the urban destruction that was the siege of Homs in 2012, and a terrific honoring of journalist Marie Colvin, who died getting the story out to the world.
A Private War movie review: this is not fake news (LFF 2018)
A moving and important portrait of legendary Times of London foreign correspondent Marie Colvin. We need more movies like this, about fearless, badass women this outrageously good at their vitally necessary work.
They Shall Not Grow Old documentary review: more museum exhibit than movie (LFF 2018)
There’s a poignant eeriness to this modernization of WWI footage: we are looking into a past that feels touchably close and immediate like never before. But this is a novelty. A solemn one, but a novelty nonetheless.
Overlord movie review: underwhelmed
This Nazis-with-supernatural-weapons horror schlock drags its feet getting to its fantastical elements and then does absolutely nothing interesting with them, just wallows in dull, rote gore and grue.
Hunter Killer movie review: dead in the water
The Hunt for Red October as made by a Michael Bay wannabe who can’t even rise to the level of giving-a-propagandistic-crap. Absurd geopolitics and laugh-out-loud clichés abound; tension and excitement do not.
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. documentary review: the multiple identities of a modern artist
A tremendous backgrounder, intimate and personal, on the massively popular — and massively political — hip-hop artist. Here is the source of all her anger and passion, and here is why she needs to be heard.
Jane Fonda in Five Acts documentary review: the political is her personal
An extraordinarily intimate and perceptive new biography of the legendary actor and activist. Fonda reveals insecurities and anxieties that are achingly raw and very personal, but which many women will see themselves in.
