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.
reviews
The Mule movie review: the old man and the drugs
Welcome to Peak Apologetics for the Bullshit of White Men, replete with many appalling messages about their endless entitlement to redemption and forgiveness. And as a bonus, it’s racist and sexist.
Nina movie review: dreary would-be sexual melodrama
Overlong and underwritten, tepid and dreary, this would-be sexual melodrama isn’t lurid enough to qualify as soft-core porn, but never finds any true emotion among its triangle of lovers, either.
Glass movie review: superhero ’splaining
Earnest and humorless, this is a faux-intellectual Comic Book Guy ponderously well-actually-ing us about shallow superhero tropes and clichés as if those are the most intriguing bits of these stories.
Destroyer movie review: holding out for an antiheroine
Nicole Kidman’s pitiless performance completely upends genre expectations in Karyn Kusama’s tense, grim crime noir. Uncompromising and subtly challenging, like a cerebral itch you can’t quite scratch.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening documentary review: a flow of time and hope
Slice-of-life and stream-of-consciousness, this is unlike any documentary before about what it’s like to be poor and black in America. RaMell Ross is an important new voice in American cinema.
Voices of the Sea documentary review: when home cannot nurture a family
A poignant, sensitive portrait of desperation, love, and survival in a beautiful place, one that is intimately Cuban, but with much wider relevance, too, in the midst of the global refugee crisis.
On the Basis of Sex movie review: Notorious RBG’s origin story
Coasts on the awesomeness of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a way unadventurous if solidly crowd-pleasing. But the depiction of her incredibly supportive marriage to a feminist man is intensely satisfying.
Polina movie review: what it takes to dance ballet
A marvelous paean to everything that goes into making great art: hard work, complicated humanity, taking risks, and trusting one’s own instincts. Anastasia Shevtsova is tremendous as a young woman with an indomitable spirit.
Bumblebee movie review: floats like a butterfly…
Nostalgic yet not mindlessly retro, a heartfelt girl-and-her-alien-robot-car action-adventure dramedy that hits all the right notes. Hailee Steinfeld is terrific, and there’s nary a whiff of Michael Bay.
