Naked Singularity movie review: New York misery
A very good cast makes a valiant go of it, but a hugely ambitious experimental novel has been boiled down to a tepid mishmash of genres: social-justice drama + black-comedy heist + sci-fi mind-bender.
Tim Blake Nelson
Just Mercy movie review: fighting the never-ending good fight
This true origin story of a literal social-justice warrior is earnest, passionate… and exhausting. We need to keep telling these stories, yet each is but another tiny drop of water in a rough ocean.
Anesthesia movie review: getting unnumbed to pain
The beautiful performances and raw intimacy are definitely worth your time, but its wispy good intentions ultimately dissipate into thin air.
Fantastic Four movie review: fantastic bore
There isn’t an authentic human motivation or emotion to be found here. The bar has been raised too high on comic-book movies for us to accept junk like this.
Blue Caprice (aka The Washington Snipers) review
Thoughtful performances and grim visual elegance aren’t enough to save this portrait of abuse and control twisted into banal evil from becoming too banal to have much bite.
Big Miracle (review)
A surprisingly pleasant dramatization of the true story told through the eyes of the TV news reporter who broke the story and the Greenpeace activist who worked tirelessly to embarrass the powers that be into helping free three whales stuck in Alaskan ice…
American Violet (review)
Lest we forget, the slide into a fascism in America didn’t begin with George W. Bush: it was well underway in the 1990s, when our police went paramilitary in the “war on drugs” and new federal incentives for local communities to get drug convictions — however they could — led to a huge increase in … more…
trailer break: ‘American Violet’
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… Can I just say: I love Tim Blake Nelson. He’s always amazing without every being showy about it — he just sneaks up on you and makes sure you can never, ever forget how amazing he is. American Violet opens in the U.S. on April 17; no … more…
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (review)
So what the Coens did with O Brother, Where Art Thou? is this: They transported Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey to this filmic otherworld of theirs, turning what is perhaps the original on-the-road story into a Depression-era fantasia that wants more for you to recognize the clever fun they’re having with filmmaking conventions of the 1930s than whether you know the least thing about ancient literature.
