handcrafted film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
With cowardly mildness, this white-bread mush misuses its star’s likability. Tom Hanks trying to be grumpy yet endearing has the opposite impact. He’s somehow less endearing than he’s been before.
The crisp, congenial charms of this intimate exploration of a decades-long working partnership overlay an unsentimental elegy for an era in journalism and publishing that has all but disappeared.
Many movies have attempted to replicate the festive insouciant brutality of Die Hard. No movie has come closer to this lofty goal than this dementedly delicious nightmare before Christmas.
The filmmaking craft may be (mostly) astonishing. But the craft must always — always — be in aid of a compelling story populated by compelling characters… and that’s not so much the case here.
There is little here we did not already know, but this is nevertheless a fascinating counterpoint to royal propaganda. Kudos to Harry’s audacity at being unwilling to perpetuate a noxious paradigm.
Long rumored — long threatened? — writer-director-producer-star Flatley’s self-financed pabulum opus is baffling and hilariously awful. It exists only because an incredibly rich man has money to burn.
Idris Elba fights a lion. This is what we are promised and this is what we get. The purity is sort of beautiful. But is it a failure of the movie, or a success, that it treats such nonsense earnestly?
Limp thriller is both overly earnest and naively preposterous. A mess of retro ideas about marriage and men, with a protagonist who lacks agency. There’s no suspense but plenty of misplaced moralizing.
There are delicious popcorn-movie vibes and horrors galore, both funny-suspenseful and stone-cold bone-chilling. But most intriguing is the twistiness of how the movie grapples with its own existence.
The rare sequel better than the original, but that’s not saying much. Takes too long to get to its surprises, its adult star is unconvincing as a child, and its minimal cleverness feels like a cheat.
