film criticism by maryann johanson, not an AI | since 1997
The internal monologue that modern women have with ourselves gets externalized in this audacious and absolutely brilliant dramedy. Poignant, vulnerable, and almost shocking, in the best possible way.
Badass UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha probes the global housing crisis and breaks down the complex cause into something readily comprehensible… then enraging. (But she has a solution, too.)
This sci-fi riff on the end of privacy is not as provocative as it would like to be, and its mystery completely falls apart in the end. But its visual worldbuilding is fascinating.
Indie science fiction with a rare humanism, a scientific and emotional mystery with a solution Hollywood wouldn’t dare go anywhere near.
Cuttingly sharp and incisive SF horror; a chillingly polite film about the fascism that rises quickly up in a moment of fearful crisis.
It’s *Twilight* for boys…
In *Step Up 3D,* street dancers in New York City meet other tough dancers in a battle to the death… or at least for the prize money to save their world from being foreclosed. This flick sprang from (among other films)…
I didn’t know, going in to *Chloe,* that it is an English-language remake of the 2003 French film *Nathalie…* So as it unspooled, I found myself not pondering sexy Gallic flicks but, instead, this: “Atom Egoyan’s been watching *Fatal Attraction,* hasn’t he?”
These kids today, with their funky step dancing and their vibrant street culture and their desperate attempts to raise tuition for private school. Where did we go wrong with them?
But if you knew when we as a species were going to buy the farm, how would you spend your final hours? That’s the question Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar asks in Last Night, which he wrote, directed, and stars in. Sort of the flip side of movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, Last Night focuses not on the heroes trying to save the planet from certain doom but instead peeks in at how ordinary people are facing the end of the world.
