Prisoners: Brute Farce
Prisoners uses competent visuals and juggernaut acting to hide behind an impression of mysteriousness that its screenplay never fully justifies.
2010s
The Tree of Life is Malick’s Memory Epic
The Tree of Life is an all-encompassing memory of a tiny life. It can’t help but stand in for all of us.
What is Everyone’s Problem With Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
Star Wars: The Last Jedi continues to be debated out of passionate frustration. This is an exploration of what’s right and wrong with this bizarre movie.
Prometheus: Creator’s Angst
The much-maligned Prometheus hides an epic sci-fi fable despite failing to satisfy its own ambitions. Fassbender is genre-defining.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters – Faithless Tribute
Godzilla: King of the Monsters avoids the essence of its brand almost as aggressively as it avoids working on its script.
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.
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.