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1980s

Rocketman movie review: what makes a rock star, and what unmakes him

Wed, May 29, 2019
3 comments

Joyful and rowdy, self-deprecating and vulnerable, absolutely electrifying as it deconstructs the sex-drugs-and-rock’n’-roll story. Taron Egerton is chills-inducingly good. Sheer cinematic magic.

| 3 Comments

Nervous Translation movie review: home alone, with only her imagination for company

Tue, Apr 16, 2019
no comments yet

Shireen Seno’s portrait of a remarkably imaginative and self-contained child at a specifically 1980s Filipino moment is full of both charming whimsy and a delicately observed, melancholy universality.

| Leave a comment

Us movie review: a new kind of horror for a newly precarious world

Wed, Mar 20, 2019
14 comments

An anxious moan, a looming disquiet of a reckoning coming for America. This is horror as weird, funny, damning, and more disconcerting the more you think about it, finding fear right in front of us.

| 14 Comments

Bumblebee movie review: floats like a butterfly…

Wed, Dec 19, 2018
33 comments

Nostalgic yet not mindlessly retro, a heartfelt girl-and-her-alien-robot-car action-adventure dramedy that hits all the right notes. Hailee Steinfeld is terrific, and there’s nary a whiff of Michael Bay.

| 33 Comments

The Front Runner movie review: when politics turned tabloid (LFF 2018)

Tue, Nov 06, 2018
4 comments

Snappy Sorkin-esque banter, 80s nostalgia, and Hugh Jackman in a bad wig yet still hot as hell. But also an enraging, ironic look at how a reality-TV resume ended up becoming a legit qualification for the American presidency.

| 4 Comments

Bohemian Rhapsody movie review: dynamite with a laser beam

Tue, Oct 30, 2018
23 comments

Rami Malek brings warmth, humor, and a down-to-earth humanity to the larger-than-life Freddie Mercury. But it is the power of Queen’s music — the rousing good cheer, its sheer rock ’n’ roll joy — that fills up this pure brash entertainment.

| 23 Comments

movies by or about women opening US/Can from Fri Sep 28

Fri, Sep 28, 2018
no comments yet

Clare Niederpruem directs a modern updating of Little Women; Eva Vives directs dramedy All About Nina; Becca Gleason directs comedy Summer ’03; more…

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Jane Fonda in Five Acts documentary review: the political is her personal

Sun, Sep 23, 2018
2 comments

An extraordinarily intimate and perceptive new biography of the legendary actor and activist. Fonda reveals insecurities and anxieties that are achingly raw and very personal, but which many women will see themselves in.

| 2 Comments

Whitney documentary review: an 80s icon contemplated, venerated, mourned

Tue, Jul 03, 2018
1 comment

Deeply moving, truly tragic; a biography with a keenly journalistic but hugely sympathetic eye. Powerful compassion and a get-up-and-dance deployment of Houston’s music may well bring her a new generation of fans.

| 1 Comment

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist documentary review: counterculture’s wise elder woman

Sun, Jun 10, 2018
2 comments

There’s nothing fawning and plenty ironic about this essential first documentary to cover a major female fashion designer, a woman whose life is almost a perfect reflection of the trajectory of 20th-century feminism.

| 2 Comments
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