A Fantastic Woman movie review: the horror of grief denied
A quiet yet resolute portrait of bravery and resilience in the face of unconscionable bigotry, and distressingly moving. Specific yet universal, and wonderfully human.
reviews
Red Sparrow movie review: undercovers agent
Ballerina turned whore-spy? This is like a cheap porn scenario, and the Hollywood gloss makes it worse. Risible yet tedious, yet another movie by men that thinks it’s critiquing misogyny yet is indistinguishable from it.
Icarus documentary review: on athletes’ compromised wings
Perfectly illustrative of the serendipitous nature of documentary filmmaking as it pivots from a personal investigation of doping in sports into a thriller with global geopolitical ramifications.
The Lodgers movie review: home is where the haunting is
Cursed twins who speak in faux-byronic enigmas, a crumbling manse full of dead birds and velvet drapes, and strained psychosexual nonsense. There’s nothing eerie here, just the puerile and misjudged.
Game Night movie review: triumph of the nerds
Absolutely hilarious, full of smart snarksters, comedic suspense, and gleeful smashing of action-movie clichés. Part screwball comedy, part romantic adventure, all pure movie-movie joy.
The Cured movie review: land of the living undead
A slow, mild exploration of guilt, grief, bigotry, and militant sectarianism, all in the context of a treatment for a zombie virus. Tepid and frustratingly underdeveloped, with few surprises.
November movie review: the woods are just trees, the trees are just wood
An all-style and very-little-substance exercise in random oddity and weird imagery. Dispenses with engaging characters and revels in its own meaninglessness as if emptiness were deep and significant.
The Boy Downstairs movie review: the ex factor
An appealing high concept that could have gone in many wildly different directions, all emotionally charged, instead wallows in a wan, bloodless banality of “chill.”
Brakes movie review: when romance comes crashing down
This ultra-low-budget indie uses its own rough edges to great effect in its skewering of the happily-ever-after rom-com fantasy. Bleak, brutal, absurd, and painfully realistic.
The Party movie review: bring your own battle
Sally Potter’s brutally snappy take on the classic British drawing-room comedy hauls it into the 21st century with a cutting takedown of the anxieties and hypocrisies of well-off left-wingers.
