Lost Girls movie review: and still unfound
Based-on-fact drama puts the focus where it rarely is onscreen: on women who are victims of male violence. Yet a terrific central performance and an abundance of empathy cannot overcome its clichés.
2020 releases
Saint Frances movie review: there will be blood — deal with it
Taboo-busting laugh-until-you-cry tale dares to speak of oft-unspoken matters of women’s lives. So very necessary to open up the range of women’s experiences seen as baseline. I love this movie.
Swallow movie review: leaves a sour taste
Half a century ago, this would have been radical. Today, it’s banal. The slick postwar aesthetic is emblematic of a male filmmaker’s understanding of women that exists only through dated stereotypes.
Military Wives movie review: tired choir dramedy needs to change the tune
So aggressively precisely what you think it is that there’s almost no point in seeing it. Flattens a true story into generic pap that isn’t even that successfully, authentically feel-good, either.
Onward movie review: the Pixar road goes ever on
Don’t let the Pixar curve throw you: familiar this quest may be, but it’s full of magic and wonder and humor and melancholy, and set in a fully realized fantasy world. Not a masterpiece but very good.
The Photograph movie review: love as a balancing act
It’s meet-melancholy in an elegant, female-gazey romantic drama audaciously mingling past and present. A swanky celebration of confident, complex women and the bittersweetness of adult relationships.
Push documentary review: why the rent is too damn high (and how to fix it)
Badass UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha probes the global housing crisis and breaks down the complex cause into something readily comprehensible… then enraging. (But she has a solution, too.)
The Lodge movie review: stuck in miserably mushy snow
This exasperating movie is so obnoxious it could be deliberately trolling us. Wants to have its ambiguous cake and eat it, too, smothered in a gloomy frosting. *extremely pinches nose in despair*
Like a Boss movie review: it doesn’t quite fall down on the job
This instantly forgettable fluff lazily relies on too many unfunny slapstick and grossout tangents. But real humor blossoms in the terrific performances and in a fast, funny, and surprising feminism.
The Call of the Wild movie review: a very good boi (mostly)
An old-fashioned kiddie adventure, sweetly earnest, equal parts scary, funny, exciting, sad, and happy, with only a bit of uncanny valley in its CGI doggo star. Definitely had something in my eye.
