film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
Just because a tale is science fiction doesn’t mean that plausibility and cohesion are not required. Yet we can see the narrative strings pulling along the puppet-characters, and in an ugly direction.
French New Wave icon Jean Seberg plays an unwitting game of cat-and-mouse with the FBI in a strangled blend of biopic and paranoid thriller. Not even always fascinating Kristen Stewart can save this.
Tense, gripping, enraging, but only about things that black Americans already know. This is a primer about racism for white people, and we must pay attention.
Tough, unanswerable human questions frame spectacular, innovative action sequences that are like superhero ballets. This series just keeps getting better.
How did a genre-smashing director make a heist thriller so generic, with characters too unlikable to be engaging but not twisted enough to be intriguing?
It’s bogged down by too many derailing tangents, but the three appealing leads have a wonderful chemistry, and it gets close to the spirit of the season.
Glossy Hollywood automatons sleepwalk through family dynamics full of forced quirkiness, excruciating cuteness, and phony emotion. Absolutely cringeworthy.
Stuns me with its scathing commentary on the real world today, wrapped up in what is some of the most delicious, most comic-booky fantasy ever.
Dull and perfunctory, this is a crime thriller that sets itself up as a revenge story but can’t manage to drum up any excitement or suspense, and precious little revenge, either.
It’s almost as if, by virtue of her fatness, Wilson is, in Bay’s mind, removed from the realm of “woman as sex-toy object” and placed back into the realm of woman-as-human-being.
