film criticism by maryann johanson | celebrating 25 years: 1997–2022
Amusing but instantly forgettable, fueled by a self-congratulatory smugness and self-reference. The best bits are the sincere stuff: a scene-stealing Pedro Pascal and a sweetly vulnerable Nic(k) Cage.
And the winners are…
Two brilliant dramas upend cinematic tropes of male vengeance with precision, patience, and grim humor. These are radical rethinks in emotional maturity surrounding men’s grief, remorse, and shame.
So aggressively precisely what you think it is that there’s almost no point in seeing it. Flattens a true story into generic pap that isn’t even that successfully, authentically feel-good, either.
Body-horror SF via Lovecraftian grotesquerie, with a now tedious rampage from Nic Cage. As if a man needs to be influenced by unfathomable aliens to turn to violence. I need more from my pulp fiction.
Our most honored films are Roma (five awards), The Favourite (four awards), and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (three awards).
Has a verve rare in big-budget movies at the moment. Fun and fresh and legitimately engages with its source material on the levels of story, visuals, and mythology all at once. It feels like discovering storytelling anew.
The superhero movie we need, and also the one we karmically deserve. A riot of hilariously zippy animation that gleefully shreds the clichés of the genre while also lovingly embracing its self-referential geek experience.
A brilliant, if demented, concept could have been The Purge for parenthood, but it is inadequately explored, and then abruptly dropped by a sudden ending. The entire third act of the film is missing.
This preposterous, stilted, often hilariously terrible domestic thriller twists maternal yearnings into a toxic parody of femininity.
