Between the Darkness
A concerted first indie horror effort whose spirit falls short of its intentions. The look outshines the script.
Films released between 2010-2019
A concerted first indie horror effort whose spirit falls short of its intentions. The look outshines the script.
Wes Anderson turns our lives into a documentary. He’s found more love in two children than most have found in the rest of us combined.
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.
An ensemble cluster of action and color anchored by one of the best villains in the genre. The series’ most essential film.
My favorite of the Disney Star Wars films. It’s rough, I’ll admit, but rugged when it counts.
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.
Not a movie for the faint of anything. If you can get through the gross stuff, you might discover a romance.
The Marvel formula can’t save an unappealing heroine from the greatest power in her universe: herself.
It’s like a workout — a lot of flexing and then a lot of fatigue. Good movies never have to try this hard.
A passionate lead performance can’t save Alita from burying itself in exposition.
An analysis of Villeneuve’s dreamy horror film. Not for the faint, the arachnophobic, or the easily confused.
It’s so admirable you’ll forget the flaws in its execution. Mainstream horror with an intellectual twist.
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?
The Western is a myth of values. True Grit is a story that appreciates these values without necessarily approving of them. This is a film made in the spirit of a long tradition, which is surprising coming from the usually more provocative Coen Brothers. But its subtle changes should not be ignored – they contain all its secret truths, and theirs.
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 is an old myth of biblical penitence that explodes into manly revolt; it’s Tarkovsky filtered through pulp-madness, and frustrated nightmare desires.
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) 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.
Wiseau finally gets to be the hero. But the movie has trouble figuring out why we wanted that.
A romance that centers on being lonely. A poem to anyone lost in our love for each other.
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.
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.
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.
If Fantastic Four is supposed the be the story of a superhero family, the 2015 adaptation makes them seem as unsupportive as you can be before civil action becomes your only option. Not only do they see no beauty or meaning in their heroic endowments, but they are so quick to give up their integrity after the accident that you think, as you never should, that these people don’t deserve their gifts.
Chazelle takes us to space and still thinks the most important things are the ones we left behind. The best film of 2018.
A shot of adrenaline in a tired genre. Edgar Wright has finally made a world that moves as fast as he does.
Impenetrably lazy, more interested in ad revenue than comedy. The worst from a master of worsts.
A totally sparkling view of living with manners and believing in beauty. Everyone was opening the doors for each other on the way out of the theater.