Robot Dreams movie review: sighs of the machines
Immerse yourself in pure unalloyed joy with a sweet, deceptively simple carbon-silicon platonic romance. Even the poignant bittersweetness of this emotional roller coaster is affirming and uplifting.
reviews
Twisters movie review: no winds of change blowing here
Hooray for Glen Powell’s star rising, but this absurdly coy movie — is it a sequel? a remake? — is a cowardly, reckless missed opportunity: it’s deeply baffling that it omits any hint of global warming.
Kinds of Kindness movie review: twilight zones of contention
A mad monstrosity of a movie: absurdist, enigmatic, perverse. Lanthimos’s typical grotesque humor is on full display. Yay for a film that actually attempts to capture how insane the world is today?
Pitch People documentary review: consumerist sideshow
The goofy-90s-cheese factor is high in this look at home-shopping TV hucksters, but any nostalgia is small and cheap. The chipper vibe is distasteful in a way it perhaps wasn’t in the booming 1990s.
IF movie review: a fantastical vibe in search of a story
Writer-director John Krasinski’s absolute desperation to whip up magical whimsy utterly fails. No matter how he tries to force enchantment into existence, this is more fever dream than flight of fancy.
Back to Black movie review: no justice for Amy Winehouse
Marisa Abela is very good as Amy Winehouse, the one saving grace of this cowardly biopic of the wild and wise musician, which hangs its subject out to dry just as the people closest to her did, too.
The Fall Guy movie review: stunt dribble
This mess isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and wastes the small charms of the delicious chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Feels like they shot a dashed-off first draft of the script.
Arcadian movie review: they mostly come at night, mostly
It exists safely within the vast subgenre of postcollapse afterscapes, but it does what it does well, with nicely drawn characters, a sense of cultural mythmaking, and freakishly unsettling creatures.
The Trouble with Jessica movie review: mortgaged souls
The pleasures of this black comedy about London real estate and the hypocrisies of posh professionals lie in the terrific cast, especially Shirley Henderson, embodying entertainingly horrible people.
Civil War movie review: a craven view from nowhere
A spineless dystopian action drama that defaults to a dangerously irresponsible both-sides-ism; its pretense of “objectivity” is unfair to the journalist protagonists the film thinks it’s championing.
