Free Guy movie review: NPC ya later…
Messy sci-fi comedy, cheerful on the surface but nihilistic underneath, is utterly clueless about all the things it is almost about: AI, gaming, and the bread-and-circuses power of immersive worlds.
reviews by year
Riders of Justice and Pig movies review: rethinking the revenge movie
Two brilliant dramas upend cinematic tropes of male vengeance with precision, patience, and grim humor. These are radical rethinks in emotional maturity surrounding men’s grief, remorse, and shame.
The Suicide Squad movie review: primrose psychopaths
Spanks the 2016 film and sends it off to the corner to think about what it did. This one is the definite article: Gory, grim, bleakly funny. Full of feverish, anarchic energy and exhausting cynicism.
Jungle Cruise movie review: raiders of the recent swashbucklers
Wonderfully escapist, dripping with magnificently congenial charm thanks to the comic chemistry of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. Plus it’s sure to enrage people who use “woke” as an insult. Yay!
Peter Rabbit 2 (aka Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway) movie review: carrot and shtick
Cynical sequel — you know, for kids! — doubles down on the nihilistic money-grubbing of the original. Thinks that being clever and meta about its own disenchantment will win us over. It does not.
The Body Fights Back documentary review: food for thought
Honest, compassionate, and very necessary, this is a provocation, a challenge to our individual and cultural preconceived notions about and neurotic relationships to food, weight, and body image.
Nowhere Special movie review: a father’s final bittersweet task
Beautiful and heartbreaking. A beguiling portrait of love, grief, and pragmatism that unites father and son, built up via tender moments of the most ordinary sort. James Norton’s performance is revelatory.
A Perfect Enemy movie review: terminal rage
Ridiculous excuse for a thriller — obvious, preposterous, ultimately banal — piles on psychological absurdities as it builds from a maddening middle to an enraging crescendo of misogynist nonsense.
Black Widow movie review: spy cruft
Dishearteningly less concerned with giving Natasha Romanoff her own story than with setting up her MCU replacement. Superfluous, backward-looking, its bit of feminism belabored. She deserved better.
Zola movie review: speed bumps in the road trip
A deliciously badass style — part 70s grindhouse, part verité pseudo-documentary — and all-in performances are undermined by an exploitive gaze, and a combination of failed caper and failed satire.
