Madame Web movie review: absurdly tangled
A travesty of corporate cynicism. Its desperation to ride Spider-Man’s coattails is pathetic, but its convoluted, coincidence-laden nonsense is duller than you’d imagine: it’s not even so bad it’s fun.
Tahar Rahim
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.
movies I can’t wait to see at the 58th BFI London Film Festival
LFF is a veritable orgy of cinema, and I love it. It’s exhausting, but I love it.
Grand Central movie rating: yellow light
French drama about nuclear workers is riveting when it focuses on the dangers of the job, less so when it devolves into a sexy working-class soap opera.
The Past review: they are family
A remarkably grounded French-Iranian drama about a broken family trying to mend; unexpectedly riveting, thanks in part to one of 2013’s best ensembles.
based on a terrible true story (Our Children review)
Harrowing and unsettling…
Free Men (Les hommes libres) (review)
I kept hoping to get caught up in this untold story of the French Resistance in more than a coolly intellectual way, but that never happened.
Black Gold (aka Day of the Falcon) (review)
There’s a lot of golden-age Hollywood in this tale of the earliest days, in the 1930s, of the Arab oil kingdoms. Some of it is just plain fun; some of it is cornball old-fashioned…
A Prophet (Un prophète) (review)
How a does a timid boy become a violent gangster? Like this.
