film criticism by maryann johanson | 25 years: 1997–2022
Has a verve rare in big-budget movies at the moment. Fun and fresh and legitimately engages with its source material on the levels of story, visuals, and mythology all at once. It feels like discovering storytelling anew.
A Star Wars–flavored juice drink* of a movie (*contains 10% real juice) that tells us nothing of significance we didn’t already know about Han Solo, in an incarnation that lacks his essential charisma and precarious danger.
A beach-slap to anyone with a brain. Embodies everything that is wrong with Hollywood today. It is proudly dumb. It is proudly sexist. It is proudly pointless.
Marvelous. A bouncy comedy mystery adventure parable in a fantasy world meticulously and cleverly conceived and gorgeously realized. I adore this movie.
Funnier even than the first film, nonstop self-deprecation that doles out well-deserved smacks to about 817 Hollywood things that desperately deserve it.
You’ve seen this all before — it’s Toy Story meets The Matrix — just not done in Legos.
I hadn’t been expecting anything from 21 Jump Street, and it turned out to be hilarious.
When I look at my watch during a movie, it’s because I’m checking to see if my guess about where in the runtime we are coincides with what just happened onscreen. This book is what makes that possible.
Like cool, it’s 21 Jump Street meets Miss Congeniality 2 meets oh my god make it stop.
I’m not talking necessarily about onscreen romantic chemistry, though sometimes that’s certainly part of it. It’s about that instant zing of that ineffable magic that sometimes happens when two actors simply mesh really, really well…
