weekend watchlist: coming to terms with grief personal and societal
Plus badass women and damned dirty apes… (First published April 30th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
Jamie Dornan
AWFJ 2021 EDA Awards winners announced
And the winners are…
Synchronic movie review: Benson and Moorhead would have voted for Obama twice if they could have…
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.
Endings, Beginnings movie review: when it ends is the best part
Love this cast, but, my god, I hate these characters. I hate this miserable take on romance, which mistakes wallowing in self-pity for introspection, and people being awful for philosophical depth.
A Private War movie review: this is not fake news (LFF 2018)
A moving and important portrait of legendary Times of London foreign correspondent Marie Colvin. We need more movies like this, about fearless, badass women this outrageously good at their vitally necessary work.
Fifty Shades Freed movie review: no shades of gray
My Fifty Shades of Grey fantasy: Anastasia Steele gets a restraining order against Christian Grey, writes a tell-all book about him, and becomes a #MeToo/#TimesUp heroine. Mmm, sexy.
Fifty Shades Darker movie review: where is the fantasy?
Thank god this insult of a movie doesn’t try to fool us into believing that the controlling Christian Grey is appealing. That would be even more horrific…
Anthropoid movie review: human-shaped but lacking in human substance
Familiar-feeling tale of a real-life plot to kill a high-ranking Nazi in 1942 Prague manages some suspense thrills but mostly misses the emotional ones.
Fifty Shades of Grey movie review: neurotica
A charm-free hero with control issues and a passive, fretful heroine have coy and tediously vanilla pretend-sex. This is meant to be erotic?
