The Passion of the Christ
A gutsy portrayal of a well-known story. But the passion has to come from you: the movie has little of its own.
Films based on a novel or series of novels
A gutsy portrayal of a well-known story. But the passion has to come from you: the movie has little of its own.
A movie where story and performance collide. As unsettling as we always knew Tilda Swinton could be.
An underappreciated throwback movie. Horrific, cheesy, and sometimes completely beautiful.
As haunting and gorgeous and cluttered as every vampire tale put together.
Veidt becomes the face of Expressionism: this is dramatic self-harm on a scale that defines greatness.
An analysis of Villeneuve’s dreamy horror film. Not for the faint, the arachnophobic, or the easily confused.
A captivity film about entire cultures. And the best sand photography ever filmed.
By employing, perverting, and redirecting the rules of wartime filmmaking to primary targets of his own design, Kubrick creates an encompassing and indispensable work of satire, penetrating as Orwell, snide as Vonnegut, enigmatic as Heller.
If Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was a tour of fantasy-land (who else thought their feelings seemed stuffed with baubles like gift-bags from a theme park?), The Chamber of Secrets is like accidentally wandering into the maintenance closet. Something is disenchanted by it, and I can think of no harsher criticism, to call something squinty that once was wide-eyed.
The world of Bambi is so beautiful and passively hostile that you can’t help but grow up.
It’s so admirable you’ll forget the flaws in its execution. Mainstream horror with an intellectual twist.
The spirit of a long tradition made new again. The Coens’ least original work, and maybe their best.
Cuaron achieves the dark enchantment the rest of the series desires. This is a promise finally fulfilled.
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.
A tale of anger so well-told it becomes mythic: cinema’s perfect anthem to self-destruction.
The aspect of rebellion in Fight Club makes it the anthem of a cinematic generation, who may not understand it at all. Remember, “the first rule of fight club is that you do not talk about fight club.” If you argued about its philosophy, its meaning, its impact, its significance, the movie would punch you in the nose.
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.
Beneath its skin, this film is really a coming of age tale. Can you see how horrifying that makes it?
Chazelle takes us to space and still thinks the most important things are the ones we left behind. The best film of 2018.
Visually daunting and perfectly performed, it’s easy to ignore the film’s muddled plot and struggle to justify its existence.
A film with tasty new charm, that you can only find if you don’t expect it to be the same charm you already ate.
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.
Here’s a tribute to the old “road to …” pictures. It might be the best of them, and no better than them.
It is a movie with no individual voice and, appropriately enough, it treats language as an impediment to be renounced. Language in It is either an echo or agent of fear. The bullies and auxiliary villains perceive language as intractable from their dominance.
The Thing’s lack of a stable form worked for Carpenter, who was able to squeeze a pure and palpable uncertainty out of never knowing who or what the Thing exactly was. But in Heijningen’s version, it seems to be more a matter of horror tradition than the transcription of a bold idea.
A nauseating movie. I’d say it was hedonistic but that requires it to be pleasurable at some point.