Tesla movie review: less than electrifying
Hawke is warm and empathetic, but the film’s artificiality is at odds with a celebration of the visionary’s life and work, and finally offputting. I wish this were either more earnest or more bonkers.
2020 releases
She Dies Tomorrow movie review: when it feels like we all die tomorrow
Filmmaker Amy Seimetz evokes a taut, cursed mundanity, an allegorical contemplation of culture at its most basic level: when it fails and everyone is hopeless. Accidentally hits our pandemic mood.
Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America documentary review: brave new day care?
Is this a documentary about quality day care for the smallest kids, or a slick PowerPoint presentation for policy wonks about the economic need to churn out cooperative corporate cogs from babyhood?
The Secret Garden movie review: weedy with misplaced eeriness
Pointless adaptation of the beloved children’s novel soaked in a gothic spookiness that seems to deliberately misunderstand the story. Neither literal enough nor magical enough. My heart was unmoved.
The Secret: Dare to Dream movie review: I’m positive this is awful
Nice Guy garbage man Josh Lucas negs sad sack Katie Holmes. Based on the pernicious self-help philosophy that insists that everything wrong with your life is your fault. You know: feel-good romance!
Radioactive movie review: science, bitch
Rosamund Pike is perfection in this intellectual romance, an unsentimental portrait of a woman striving to be appreciated for her mind at a time even more anti-woman than today. Feminist and flinty.
First Cow movie review: new world, same as the old world
A simple story about friendship. A revisionist Western reworking fables of masculinity and frontiers. A softly savage deconstruction of the American dream, of capitalism itself. An astonishing movie.
Last and First Men movie review: a sobering message from the future (EIFF 2020)
A mesmerizing, haunting contemplation of the headiest issues we ever confront: evolution and extinction, the depths of time, the meaning of life. Screams with ominous alarm for the human future.
John Lewis: Good Trouble documentary review: how to bend the arc of history
Essential portrait of the US Congressman and civil-rights activist, for its lessons in the power of passive resistance to injustice, and its underscoring of how America has regressed in recent years.
Greyhound movie review: Tom Hanks goes a-LARPing
How very kind of Tom Hanks to lend his gravitas and inescapable likability to a bunch of WWII naval reenactors on their weekend-getaway “crossing the north Atlantic in 1942 dodging U-boats” campaign.
