film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
A simple story about friendship. A revisionist Western reworking fables of masculinity and frontiers. A softly savage deconstruction of the American dream, of capitalism itself. An astonishing movie.
A limp noodle of a cinematic noir that drains Patricia Clarkson of her usual eccentric charisma. And where it aims for intriguingly oblique pseudoscientific philosophizing, it ends up merely obtuse.
A descent into the muddy trenches of World War I that is intimate and immediate, melancholy and profoundly moving. An experience as visceral as it is intellectual.
The living, breathing, bleeding life of the breathtaking fight scenes cannot overcome confusingly twisty spy intrigue and multiple male gazes on the story.
Eschewing the compelling SF questions it raises, Morgan resorts to violence and would-be cleverness, and makes concrete what it should have left ambiguous.
This ridiculous flick wants to have its pseudoscience cake and eat it too…
Would really really like for you to feel the grand, sweeping, larger-than-life mythos, and borrows willy-nilly from Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro to try to do so.
Why does no one ever intone at me and tell me to go to Budapest and wear polyester and smoke cigarettes and get all espionagey, dammit?
It’s now a tossup whether the best comic-book superhero movie of 2011 is X-Men: First Class or Captain America: First Avenger… But I’m leaning toward Captain America.
Holy mole-y! It’s a geek girl’s dream cast.
