The Party movie review: bring your own battle
Sally Potter’s brutally snappy take on the classic British drawing-room comedy hauls it into the 21st century with a cutting takedown of the anxieties and hypocrisies of well-off left-wingers.
reviews by year
Black Panther movie review: absolute Marvel
Classic comic-book stuff made fresh by drawing on underexplored mythologies and cultures, yet still deeply resonant and deeply universal. An exhilarating pulp-fiction dream that ups the ante on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Basmati Blues movie review: like white savior on rice
Part hamfisted critique of Big Ag, part strained romantic comedy, and part insipid musical that’s not much like the Bollywood tribute it’s meant to be. An accidental parody of itself.
The 15:17 to Paris movie review: hell on wheels
Clint Eastwood turns a terrorist attack into a bit of post-hoc reality “entertainment” with the stunt casting of the actual heroes as themselves in a stilted, tone-deaf piece of Christian-American propaganda.
Fifty Shades Freed movie review: no shades of gray
My Fifty Shades of Grey fantasy: Anastasia Steele gets a restraining order against Christian Grey, writes a tell-all book about him, and becomes a #MeToo/#TimesUp heroine. Mmm, sexy.
The Mercy movie review: a sea of troubles
An unsettling true story smartly told, from a moment in time at once uniquely its own and a harbinger of things to come. Colin Firth is subtle, unflinching, extraordinary.
Scorched Earth movie review: there’s still room for feminism at the end of the world
Gina Carano roams a mild yet tedious postapocalyptic wasteland as a bounty hunter, and either you are here for this lady badass of our feminazi dreams, or you are not.
Peter Rabbit movie review: splat the bunny
Tosses out the very sentiments that make Beatrix Potter’s work so beloved and so enduring in favor of the sullen bratty championing of cruelty and disenchantment. Nihilistic money-grubbing garbage.
Winchester movie review: she hosts dead people
The story of a fascinating woman retold in the most reductive, least resonant way possible, while actually sidelining her. Even cast as a simple haunted-house tale, it’s not even a little bit scary.
Journey’s End movie review: where the war winds blow
A descent into the muddy trenches of World War I that is intimate and immediate, melancholy and profoundly moving. An experience as visceral as it is intellectual.
