The Brutalist movie review: red, white, and brutal
Stark and unsentimental, as stubborn and as challenging as its protagonist, and as monumental as his works. Adrien Brody’s performance is extraordinary, full of flinty anger and palpable melancholy.
1940s
Blitz movie review: the unraveling of propaganda
Picaresque childhood misadventures sketch vibrant WWII London. A movie of brutal randomness, feral intensity, and ferocious intimacy. Wildly human, artistically masterful, and completely magnificent.
Lee movie review: the things she saw, and the way she saw them
It barely scratches the surface of the enormous audacity of WWII photographer Lee Miller, but still this is an important movie. It’s also joyous filmmaking, with terrific performances all around.
Maestro movie review: changing the tune, masterfully (London Film Festival)
Oh, frabjous film! Bradley Cooper’s astonishing high-wire act feels classic and modern at the same time: immersive and impressionistic, breathtakingly bold. A kick in the pants to mainstream cinema.
Godzilla Minus One movie review: the horrors of the past, reconsidered
The king of all monsters gets a period-piece reboot, and it’s the closest the series has gotten since to the sincere, unironic horrors of the 1954 original. No comfy escape from terrible reality here.
Oppenheimer movie review: a particle of concern, a wave of complicity
With human paradoxes at its nucleus, this is a riveting portrait, both intimate and epic, of the self-involved men who think they make the world go round… and too often, tragically, do.
Charlatan movie review: more vegetative than herbal
An intriguing story with engaging performances about a compelling real-life character, but oddly inert, and can’t quite make all its many aspects gel into a wholly satisfying or wholly coherent story.
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.
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.
Shirley movie review: lost girls gone mad
A beautiful-ugly film, a work of domestic gothic grotesquerie, of women’s suffocation and sacrifice, pain and isolation. Elisabeth Moss’s performance is next-level glorious in its wackadoo intensity.
