film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
An electrifying style lights up this geek adventure of the intersections between science, culture, and capitalism in the 19th-century battle to power our world. Cumberbatch and Shannon are brilliant.
Garbage. A bad excuse for a movie, even for the pulpy disposable popcorn nonsense it wants to be. Incoherent and illogical, cheap and shoddy. Wannabe sci-fi action horror that can’t pull off any of it.
As harshly beautiful as its landscape, this is a stark corrective to the American western it echoes, and a pragmatic confrontation with the deep, tenacious roots of modern racism.
A facile riff on Romeo & Juliet amongst Brussels gangs. Banal, clichéd, and treats its teenage-girl protagonist in a spectacularly disgusting way.
So entertaining, so unexpected, so wonderfully oddball, so damn good. Witty genre-busting simmering with pathos, humor, and calamity.
I’m starting to get it. Men are simply so piss-in-their-pants terrified of women that they must reduce us to bits and pieces in order to even begin to cope with the horror.
Oh, it’s horrific, all right: wooden performances and stilted exposition, punctuated by bouts of random bloody sadism.
Okay, this is it. Summer is over. Back to school. Back to work. Put on a sweater and get serious.
I’m so looking forward to this…
Sheesh, you could do a solid two solid months of film-festivaling, traveling from Venice to Toronto to New York to London for these carnivals of cinemania, an odyssey that sounds to me as wonderful as it does exhausting.
