Onward movie review: the Pixar road goes ever on
Don’t let the Pixar curve throw you: familiar this quest may be, but it’s full of magic and wonder and humor and melancholy, and set in a fully realized fantasy world. Not a masterpiece but very good.
Lord of the Rings
Push documentary review: why the rent is too damn high (and how to fix it)
Badass UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha probes the global housing crisis and breaks down the complex cause into something readily comprehensible… then enraging. (But she has a solution, too.)
Tolkien movie review: it doesn’t wander, but it’s lost
This infuriatingly reductive biopic of the Hobbit author renders him as stolid and dull, and removes all the mystery and the wonder from creative inspiration. Literal-minded and free of magic.
Robin Hood (2018) movie review: it should be outlawed
Ugly, garish, anachronistic like a small mean child playing with matches, and completely lacking in anything Robin Hood–y: there’s no fun, no romance, no virtue. Instead? Bizarre “aesthetics” and even worse politics.
Little Women (2018) movie review: sisters weird
This modern update of the beloved classic novel is embarrassingly misjudged, so earnest and on-the-nose a transfer to today that the March sisters feel not like modern girls but odd, out-of-step transplants from another time.
The Happytime Murders movie review: schlock puppets
Ugly, sordid, and proud of it, with less than no justification. “Meet the Feebles meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit” conveys a far greater sense of dignity, cohesion, and purpose than this witness movie deserves.
Ready Player One movie review: trivial pursuit*
A nightmare of nothingness, of empty, soulless wankery, that serves only to reassure male dorks that their pop-culture obsessions make them special, and will make cute girls like them.
Mary Magdalene movie review: the Gospel of Mary
A fiercely feminist and proudly revisionist historical drama that offers a powerful and much-needed rebuke to modern Christianity. Enrapturingly beautiful and intensely emotional.
Maze Runner: The Death Cure movie review: cute boys at the end of the world
The Auto-Tuned boy-band version of the apocalypse. You will forgive that every plot point that isn’t a cliché is in fact a plot hole because the hero is so dreamy and impossibly perfect, right?
Bright movie review: every little thing it does is the opposite of magic
Trolls the viewer and condescends to genre fans. A smirking, tone-deaf parable about racism that is itself racist, including about its made-up orcs and elves.
