Midsommar movie review: välkommen to weird Ikea
It’s hard to escape the sense that Ari Aster is getting off on Florence Pugh sobbing and screaming as he fetishizes her terror and torment. And none of it is in the pursuit of any meaning or message.
Will Poulter
The Little Stranger movie review: so many ways to be haunted
A glorious gothic conundrum of obsession, delusion, psychological infection, and just possibly actual malevolent spirits. The most haunting aspect of this eerily enrapturing film may be the sly, maddening ambiguity of it all.
Detroit movie review: racism 101 for white people
Tense, gripping, enraging, but only about things that black Americans already know. This is a primer about racism for white people, and we must pay attention.
The Maze Runner movie review: a terrible feeling of deja vu
Bland and generic beyond the small pleasures of its theme-park-ride-esque thrills and its half-intriguing, half-infuriating mystery.
Plastic review: movie declined
Preposterous and charmless, this heist flick purports to be based on a true story and hopes to invoke a Robin Hood vibe, but I’m not buying any of it.
We’re the Millers review: broken bad
Reason No. 34,075 to legalize drugs: it would eliminate painfully unfunny comedies like this one. Comedy shouldn’t make you pity the comedians.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (review)
More like Voyage of the Yawn Treader, actually. Little kids will surely find this collection of fantastical geegaws enthralling — look, a talking mouse! hey, a minotaur! — but as a grownup fan of the magical and the mysterious, I was almost totally bored by this third, and perhaps most tryingly pious, installment in C.S. Lewis’s fanciful spin on Christian mythology.
