Renfield movie review: it mostly sucks
Nicholas Hoult is lovely. Hammy Nicolas Cage is amusing. But everyone in this movie is in a different movie; the tonal mismatches are baffling. Was it the first draft of this script that was greenlit?
New Orleans
Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer and A Crime on the Bayou documentaries review: Black history matters
Two new documentaries — one a shrewdly incisive work of journalism, the other a delicately elegant tale of injustice and friendship — tell all-but-forgotten histories of Black America. Of America.
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.
The Secret: Dare to Dream movie review: I’m positive this is awful
Nice Guy garbage man Josh Lucas negs sad sack Katie Holmes. Based on the pernicious self-help philosophy that insists that everything wrong with your life is your fault. You know: feel-good romance!
The Lovebirds movie review: breaking up on the run
The hugely appealing Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani share terrific comic and romantic chemistry and work their everywoman and -man charm to the max. Go-to goofy escapism for, say, a pandemic lockdown.
Out of Blue movie review: murder most muted
A limp noodle of a cinematic noir that drains Patricia Clarkson of her usual eccentric charisma. And where it aims for intriguingly oblique pseudoscientific philosophizing, it ends up merely obtuse.
movies by or about women opening UK/Ire from Wed Aug 22
Susanna Fogel directs a comedy about a spy’s girlfriend; Renee Edwards directs a documentary about New Orleans musicians; more…
The Intervention and There Is a New World Somewhere movies review: women on the verge
Two movies about women at crossroads in their lives explore the sort of personal crisis — lost mojo! — typically reserved for men onscreen.
Mississippi Grind movie review: a killer hand
A compelling character study of two intriguingly flawed people, the sort of richly observed drama that has gotten all but pushed out of mainstream cinema.
Focus movie review: con inartistry
Unpleasant, humor free, and contrary to accepted codes of movie morality. And that’s before it shows its hand as a pile of implausible sentimental mush.
