Madame Web movie review: absurdly tangled
A travesty of corporate cynicism. Its desperation to ride Spider-Man’s coattails is pathetic, but its convoluted, coincidence-laden nonsense is duller than you’d imagine: it’s not even so bad it’s fun.
9/11
daily stream: modern noir with Jason Statham and his best kind of costar
2012’s Safe is on Netflix on both sides of the Atlantic; stream on UK Prime for 11 more days.
daily scream: hell is full, 21st-century style
2004’s Dawn of the Dead is on Starz in the US, Netflix in the UK (and lots of other services too!).
daily stream: is this the way the world ends?
2006’s Children of Men leaves UK iPlayer on October 4th; on Prime in the US.
behind the scenes: I am unmoored and paralyzed by polycrisis
tl;dr: Finally able to step back from my year of hell and take a deep breath, all I see is pandemic denial, the world on fire, and fascists getting bolder and bolder. I feel so hopeless, and so helpless.
daily stream: snappy cinematic junk food to distract from terrible reality
2001’s Ocean’s Eleven leaves UK Prime soon; on Prime and Apple TV in the US.
The Card Counter movie review: unnatural stillness at the center of the storm
Grim, mysterious, and unsettling, never more so than when it is quiet and still. But a brutality lurks below its calm, slick surface. Oscar Isaac’s performance is a work of astonishing minimalism.
Copilot movie review: how love warps women’s lives
Tragic anti-romance uses cinematic conventions and the presumptions of fiction to disorient us. Bursts the bubble of a certain kind of movie delusion to highlight a harsh reality of women’s lives.
A Quiet Place: Part II movie review: this one goes to 11
A marvel of a sequel that smartly avoids any attempt to recapture the original, instead expanding its world in every way possible. Brisk, crisp, efficient, and full of masterful sequences of suspense.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm movie review: punching way the hell up
A work of breathtaking audacity. This is as perilous as comedy gets, and it’s very, very funny, often shockingly so. Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing cultural strikes land like extinction-level asteroids.
