film criticism by maryann johanson | 25 years: 1997–2022
The hypocrisy of the world’s expectations of girls gets a gently sardonic knock via an audaciously confident young woman battling to be herself. This is a lovely, goofy movie, easygoing and chaotic.
This is scorched-earth cinema that challenges us to find moments of grace and triumph among misery, cruelty, and emotional frugality. Maxine Peake is absolutely incendiary.
Sensitive drama about traumatic brain injury, featuring an extraordinary performance by Paddy Considine and much brutal honesty about men’s inability to deal with their own emotions.
Audacious, outrageous, bleakly funny. Not since Charlie Chaplin sent up Hitler and invited us to laugh at terrible reality has there been a movie like this.
Stakes out its own fresh place in an SF subgenre that is well played out, and rehumanizes it ways that are both extraordinarily moving and deeply unnerving.
Authentically female in how it gets inside a lifelong friendship between two women, and as wisely funny as it is sharply poignant.
Overly complicated yet somehow anticlimactic, and constructed more with pat Hollywood pomp rather than the authentic grit it demands.
One of the rare movies that gets absolutely everything right, bursting with happy-tears emotion about solidarity, friendship, and smashing bigotry.
A whole lotta violent bigoted men discussing women’s lives as if they merit any say in the matter.
Paddy Considine is always amazing. And this story is pretty daring…
