Grimsby (aka The Brothers Grimsby) movie review: grim indeed
A soul-crushing experience: lazy, cheap, lurid, and stupid. Painfully unfunny and pointless. Sacha Baron Cohen now panders to those he once rightly mocked.
reviews
Hail, Caesar! movie review: far from perfect, but pretty swell
Full of the Coen Brothers’ usual exuberant joie de cinema, and a helluva lot of fun, but too scattershot to ever settle on saying the things it has to say.
The Boy and the Beast movie rating: yellow light
A few instances of gorgeous and magical imagery cannot make up for the lack of genuine emotion or a fresh story. Strictly for devoted anime fans.
Emelie movie review: bad babysitter, under a glossy veneer
A slow-burn twist on the home-invasion story with a creepily classy atmosphere of dread and menace, but where it ends up is the stuff of hoary cliché.
London Has Fallen movie review: agitprop security theater
A Nuremberg rally for 21st-century America. Pure terror porn: racist, jingoistic, thoroughly obnoxious. Donald Trump voters will love it. *sob*
The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence documentaries review: when horror doesn’t destroy humanity
Piercing insights into the minds of murderers, and then astonishing generosity from those left behind. Deeply despairing, then restores a bit of hope.
Embrace of the Serpent movie review: mild Amazonian odyssey
More intriguing in its ambitions than in it successes, which are limited, and oddly keeps its distance from the very people it wants to enlighten us about.
Theeb movie review: a tiny slice of the Great War, through a child’s eyes
A gorgeous, cracking adventure with a smart ring of authenticity, full of pulpy twists and perils, and with a sweetly naive but gruffly charming young hero.
Youth movie rating: red light
Overwrought nine-tenth-life crisis drama; not even a great cast can create sympathy for the artistic and existential turning points on arty display.
Mustang movie review: the “wife factory”
Smart, perceptive, keenly observant, heartbreaking: how the world crushes girls and turns lively people into automatons merely because they are female.
