film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
You already know the score — duh da-duh-da-duh! duh da-duh-da-duh! — but in case you’ve forgotten, The Nutcracker in 3D will attempt to mainline it into your brain, fuel-injecting sugar-plum fairy juice into your festivus lobe at the drop of, um, a sugar plum. If you think that’s a horrendously mixed metaphor, it’s got nothing on this polar-express train wreck…
I’ve come to realize recently that there’s something more chilling, more eerie than a fictional dystopic world: a fictional dystopic world in which no one understands they’re living in a dystopia. Tthe extraordinarily moving and deeply unsettling Never Let Me Go comes at its horrors gently, almost idyllically, in such a way that allows us to instantly see everything that has gone awry in this alternate world without ever letting its characters do the same.
