Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall doesn’t really need to be “reviewed” in the traditional sense. It’s a dumb movie about monsters invading medieval China and the brazenly anachronistic army tasked with staving it off, like someone fell asleep during The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and attempted to recreate the Battle of Helm’s […]
How do you possibly improve on the grace, skill, class and economy of John Wick, the film that wrote the book on making impeccable filmmaking technique appear totally effortless? Strange as it may seem, the answer is do exactly the same, only better. John Wick: Chapter 2 contains all of the typical downfalls of modern […]
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is the culmination of every adjective used to describe the director’s work—poetic, intelligent, philosophical, gorgeous—but with a sense of grounding that makes its style and themes that much more effective. A Jarmusch film is most often an exploration of the artist’s own influences; while he never artificially inserts himself or reduces his […]
Watching Gold, you can’t help but feel that every member of this production arrived with a different sense of what the final product would be. Stephen Gaghan is directing a fact-based procedural, Robert Elswit is shooting a psychological comedy-drama and Matthew McConaughey came overprepared for a madcap crime farce. The result plays out like American […]
Credit where it’s due: that M. Night Shyamalan would even attempt something as utterly unhinged as Split is admirable on some level. The plot you may have gleaned from the one-dimensional marketing—involving a misrepresentation of dissociative identity disorder and possible ’90s-style transphobia—does not even begin to scratch the surface of what Shyamalan is going for […]
Patriots Day is a reductive, insulting, dishonest bit of emotional manipulation that bullies its audience into withholding criticisms out of fear that they will be taken as insults against the heroic people of Boston who came together in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. No, director Peter Berg and co-producer/star Mark Wahlberg do […]
Hidden Figures is a story that must be told for its own sake-—the overlooked contributions of brilliant scientists and mathematicians who have been left out of history for their gender and race—but as a film, it rises to the challenge with a devastatingly clear grasp of how deep racism goes in our society. Hidden Figures […]
They said 2016 was the worst year for movies in recent memory. But for every Batman v Superman: Yawn of Justice, there were at least two amazing works of genius clamoring for recognition. Some are simple movies of modest scale, others layered in ways we’ll still be studying years from now, but all prove that […]
The myth of the Kennedys and Camelot is so interwoven in the fabric of American history and identity that we often forget how intentionally it was constructed to be just that. The style, the dinners, the decorations, everything was carefully planned to project a particular image that would inspire Americans and survive long after the […]
Normally when a film comes out in mid-December with a cast full of movie stars and a vaguely philosophical name, it’s either a Christmas movie or an Oscar bid. Collateral Beauty makes a play for both, a move that could have been bold had it been the first holiday film to have genuine pedigree in […]