reviews

Now Is Good (review)

7 comments

Why does Dakota Fanning get to really live onscreen here in a way that Teh Movies don’t usually allow girls to do? Because she’s dying.

End of Watch (review)

4 comments

David Ayer has pulled off an all-new LAPD cop action drama with a vibrancy so electric that the screen seems to sing from the film’s opening moments, and keeps ringing long after the film ends.

Premium Rush (review)

1 comment

In real life, a bike messenger with a death wish is an urban hazard. But in a zippy popcorn flick and played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt? He’s a charmer…

Anna Karenina (review)

13 comments

There is no pretense that we’re getting a realistic depiction of late-19th-century Russia. Director Joe Wright isn’t merely crafting a metaphor about the social structures under which we all live: he’s underscoring the artificiality of cinema itself.

The Queen of Versailles (review)

4 comments

Ends up an ever less slightly ungenerous look at the .01 percent than it might have been absent the 2008 financial crash, because even the uberwealthy get stressed when money gets tight. But this is still a brutal film from many angles.

Dredd (review)

73 comments

I dunno much about Judge Dredd. I know he springs from a comic book series, I know he’s Judge Judy and executioner, and I know he never takes his helmet off. Forget the roughshodding of civil rights: it’s that last one that’s a major bummer.