Anthropoid movie review: human-shaped but lacking in human substance
Familiar-feeling tale of a real-life plot to kill a high-ranking Nazi in 1942 Prague manages some suspense thrills but mostly misses the emotional ones.
1940s
The Legend of Tarzan and Free State of Jones movies review: enough with the white saviors
Filtering other people’s stories through the eyes of white men is tedious and offensive, and it feels like a desperate hedge against fresh perspectives.
Florence Foster Jenkins movie review: don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear
When FFJ sticks to farce, it works wonderfully, like something P.G. Wodehouse might have loved. But the longer it goes on, the more maudlin it gets.
Little Boy movie review: faith-based bomb
A shamefully miscalculated tale of whimsy and come-to-Jesus inspiration with a bizarrely inappropriate haze of Norman Rockwell-esque nostalgia.
Embrace of the Serpent movie review: mild Amazonian odyssey
More intriguing in its ambitions than in it successes, which are limited, and oddly keeps its distance from the very people it wants to enlighten us about.
Son of Saul movie review: how to remain human
Did you think you had heard all the unbearable stories about the Holocaust? You hadn’t. Hard to watch, but an essential installment of Holocaust cinema.
What Happened, Miss Simone? documentary review: this is what happened
Powerful, intimate, and fresh. We desperately need to hear more women talking about being driven in an inexorable way toward a passion.
The Letters (aka Letters from Mother Teresa) movie review: utter nunsense
A fatuous argument for Mother Teresa’s sainthood; credulous and willfully ignorant, and disregards everything about her beliefs that was nasty or skeptical.
Pan movie review: a disaster of fantastically epic proportions
An embarrassingly empty pastiche of numerous beloved action blockbusters, all frenetic action and soulless mishmashes of fantasy imagery.
Mr. Holmes movie review: the case of the missing myth
It looks lovely and Ian McKellen is amazing, of course, but it’s not very Holmesian. I suspect Holmes himself would snort in derision at its sentimentality.
