Locating Realism in The Revenant
The Revenant is a powerful statement on cinematic realism affected but not marred by its real toil. It’s old cinema made epic again.
2010s
Interstellar: Feeling Machine
Interstellar’s brilliant technical filmmaking hinges on a story thwarted by melodrama. Its head is full of ideas, but its heart is empty.
Let Me In: Warm Leftovers
Let Me In is an arousing remake that makes a cautionary tale more streamlined, romantic, and cathartic, three things it probably never intended to be.
Zack Snyder vs Superman: Why Intent Became Conflict in Man of Steel
A response to Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel as well as to the debates about it, including both its problematic execution and its honest desire for greatness.
Saint Maud: Timid Prophet
Saint Maud is a confident debut from a promising filmmaker, but its self-imposed genre tropes become limitations that hold it back from greatness.
First Man: Cultural Breakthrough
With First Man, Damien Chazelle takes us to space and still thinks the most important things are the ones we left behind. The best film of 2018.
Brooklyn: Cautious Fairytale
Brooklyn is a well-meaning new version of the kind of movie we used to make much more easily. It’s not masterful, but at least it’s respectable.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – Force Illusion
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is as sloppy for its artists as embarrassing for its fans. It is brand mismanagement in visual form.
Enemy: The Right Wrong Man
An analysis of Villeneuve’s dreamy thriller, Hitchcock accelerated to spiritual attack speed. Arachnophobes beware.
Ad Astra: Space Melodrama
Ad Astra attempts to be a space opera and family melodrama. Failing both makes even its best intentions seem misplaced from other films.
Midsommar: The Director’s Cut – Empowerment Horror
Ari Aster’s Midsommar shows the dark side of empowerment, which is its main success. That so many consider it a self-help film is its main curiosity.
1917: Tech Epic
1917 is a capable demonstration of technology matched to an overreaching story. Exactly what meets the eye.
Alice Through the Looking Glass: To the Anti-Wonder
Alice Through the Looking Glass is to wonderment what purging is to eating. It not only robs you of your meal – it even makes you regret it.
Rocco
In Rocco, thematic duplicity is even more apparent in the disjunction between the film and its subject, the international porn “giant,” Rocco Siffredi.
Paddington 2: Steamboat Bear Jr.
Paddington 2 sparkles with manners and a belief in beauty. Everyone was opening the doors for each other on the way out of the theater.
The Insignificance of Language in It (2017)
It is a movie with no individual voice and, appropriately enough, it treats language as an impediment to be renounced.