
Sew Torn movie review: patchwork pastiche
The quirks of this slightly fantastical black-comedy crime thriller are many, varied, and messily disjointed. But there’s a delicious oddness to its unpredictability and its spin on familiar tropes.

The quirks of this slightly fantastical black-comedy crime thriller are many, varied, and messily disjointed. But there’s a delicious oddness to its unpredictability and its spin on familiar tropes.

This relentless, heart-in-your-throat, ticking-clock thriller about precarious single-motherhood could not be more timely or more intimate. As real, and as recognizably stressful, as the genre gets.

Writer/director Tom Tykwer captures all of GenX’s best qualities — energy, resourcefulness, independence — and he does so in the shared visual vernacular of Xers: music videos, video games, and television.
Like Nigel Tufnel’s amp, this one goes to 11. I agonized over this, trying to whittle down a list of about 25 great movies of 1999 to a mere 10, and I just couldn’t go that far. It pained me to eliminate some wonderful — and wonderfully adult — dramas from the list. The Cider … more…