The Social Network: Misanthropy Memoir
The figure is troubled; the movie is precise. It’s a tribute to patter more than to a man.
2010s
Films released between 2010-2019
Interstellar: Feeling Machine
No shortage of mechanical beauty and a heart full of intent. This doesn’t stop it from being loud.
The 100 Best Movies of the 2010s
This decade saw new studios created and old ones bought. Here’s my pick for the 100 Best Movies of the 2010s.
Only God Forgives: Violent Delusion
Refn is suffering from a sex and violence delusion. After this, you might be too.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi: The Price of Ambition
With The Rise of Skywalker coming out, I wrote my final evaluation, for good and bad, of one of the most debated movies ever.
Between the Darkness
A concerted first indie horror effort whose spirit falls short of its intentions. The look outshines the script.
Moonrise Kingdom: American Comic
Wes Anderson turns our lives into a perfect documentary of feeling. It’s not real, but it’s important.
The Final Word: It’s Time to Retire the Term “Mary Sue”
The talk of what it means to be a Mary Sue has gotten so emotional that I think it’s time for the term to disappear. But not before my final word.
Avengers: Infinity War and the Power of Change
An ensemble cluster of action and color anchored by one of the best villains in the genre. The series’ most essential film.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
My favorite of the Disney Star Wars films. It’s rough, I’ll admit, but rugged when it counts.
Shazam!
Not only does the movie walk on air, it never loses sight of the people on the ground. Few movies have been less ashamed to be themselves.
Swiss Army Man
Not a movie for the faint of anything. If you can get through the gross stuff, you might discover a romance.
Captain Marvel
The Marvel formula can’t save an unappealing heroine from the greatest power in her universe: herself.
Thor: Ragnarok
It’s like a workout — a lot of flexing and then a lot of fatigue. Good movies never have to try this hard.
Alita: Battle Angel
A passionate lead performance can’t save Alita from burying itself in exposition.
Enemy Explained
An analysis of Villeneuve’s dreamy horror film. Not for the faint, the arachnophobic, or the easily confused.
Annihilation Analysis: Smart Movies Have it Rough
It’s so admirable you’ll forget the flaws in its execution. Mainstream horror with an intellectual twist.
The Mummy (2017)
What was once a man’s desperate quest to resurrect his lost lover ala Dracula has been turned into a petulant girl’s desire to reincarnate the god she serves ala Suicide Squad. Could there be a more fitting beginning to this venture?
True Grit (2010)
The spirit of a long tradition made new again. The Coens’ least original work, and maybe their best.
The Man Who Invented Christmas
A Christmas Carol is such a tired tale by now that the first task of this new film should have been to make old hat seem tailored for the first time. But as Dickens picks up well-known artifices of his story off the street, you become infected by that terribly un-jolly feeling that this is one of those movies – one in which random people will speak full Dickensian quotes for the good author to overhear and jot down, in which everyone he meets has a name that will go into one of his stories.
Mandy
Mandy is an old myth of biblical penitence that explodes into manly revolt; it’s Tarkovsky filtered through pulp-madness, and frustrated nightmare desires.
Joe
Without Joe’s perspective of the world he hates, there’s nothing – not even resentment – with which we can empathize. Joe is left merely with things we can’t condone. This doesn’t prevent it from stopping your blood with its performances. The depth of Cage’s eyes describes hurt in ways that words fail.
Peter Rabbit (2018)
Peter Rabbit (2018) is awkward. It’s a heap of a film, and not at all because it’s different. Even the best satire is stuffed with sincerity, like a rabbit full of radishes he’s insisting just up and disappeared. Without it, there’s nothing but smugness.
The Disaster Artist
Wiseau finally gets to be the hero. But the movie has trouble figuring out why we wanted that.
Her: We are the Techno-Lonely
A romance that centers on being lonely. A poem to anyone lost in our love for each other.
Wish Upon
Though it’s awkwardly unscary, even anti-scary because of your inevitable laughter, its flaws are deeper than its genre. This movie is eerily comfortable offering nothing new to horror movies with a premise that, when it was just on paper, was okayed by someone without any plea for originality.
The Cloverfield Paradox
I have not in recent memory seen a film whose concept is more divergent from its filmmaking than The Cloverfield Paradox. It is a movie so dumbfoundingly predictable and yet so incomprehensible that it becomes meaningless even as an average film, a paradox only in the sense that its grand pretensions cannot occupy the same space as the need to connect a franchise that was never intended to be cohesive.
The Wailing (Gokseong)
Every frame of The Wailing wades into dream space and out again. Nature in it becomes a backdrop not just to a murder investigation but to the primordial evils of human emotion that would make such an investigation necessary to begin with. We never know if people murder each other because of the anger pent up in a demonic spirit or just the anger pent up in themselves.