The Cut movie review: head not in the game
A real aspect of boxing — dangerously fast weight loss — sports films have ignored becomes body horror we have not seen before. The genre’s motivational clichés get twisted, nastily and poignantly.
John Turturro
Gloria Bell movie review: an (extra)ordinary woman
Julianne Moore pulls off the small miracle of tamping down her own intense charisma while still imbuing the ordinary, unglam Gloria with lively verve and a dynamism of low-key resilience personified.
Landline movie review: love in the time before smartphones
A charming delight in a retro timeslip. Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate continue their rampage of creating wonderfully, memorably flawed women onscreen.
God’s Pocket movie review: rot in the city
The cast is amazing and the film has a certain grim visual beauty. But ultimately there is little here but ugly senselessness.
Fading Gigolo review: Twilight for middle-aged men
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that looks more like the filmmaker’s midlife-crisis wish-fulfillment fantasy than this one.
women! if they don’t get you with their knives, they’ll get you with their vaginas
I’m starting to get it. Men are simply so piss-in-their-pants terrified of women that they must reduce us to bits and pieces in order to even begin to cope with the horror.
The Nutcracker in 3D (review)
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…
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan movie review: not messing with the Zohan
I’m overstating a little: I cannot honestly say that I loved Zohan. But in a relative sense, given my history with Sandler, it is a huge admission to me to say that I kinda got a kick out of this silly movie.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (review)
So what the Coens did with O Brother, Where Art Thou? is this: They transported Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey to this filmic otherworld of theirs, turning what is perhaps the original on-the-road story into a Depression-era fantasia that wants more for you to recognize the clever fun they’re having with filmmaking conventions of the 1930s than whether you know the least thing about ancient literature.
Desperately Seeking Susan movie review
A new-fashioned screwball comedy combining improbable elements, from ancient Egyptian artifacts to downtown New York chic, with classic conceits like mistaken identity and romantic conundrums.
