Film Reviews

Don’t Hang Up

Don’t Hang Up

Ms. Ginsburg Goes to Washington

Ms. Ginsburg Goes to Washington

Vice Can’t Make Sense of Dick Cheney, but It Can Give You a Headache

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 24, 2018

Don’t look to Vice for psychology or even a sense of presence; McKay uses the Cheneys’ grim unknowability as an excuse not to bother going for either
Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk Does James Baldwin Proud

By Chuck Wilson
Dec 24, 2018

Baldwin’s central story, dialogue and time-jumping narrative structure are all in place, but so, too, is a sumptuous visual style that serves to deepen the novelist’s themes of racial injustice and the powerful countering force of love
Welcome to Marwen Crashes Into the Limits of Hollywood’s Imagination

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 21, 2018

At times, as it dissolves between scenes of its cast as literal toy dolls machine-gunning Nazis in the made-up Belgian town of Marwen, Zemeckis’ movie seems an inquisition into the limits of the director’s own imagination
Searching for Ingmar Bergman Is a Cheery Toasting of a Most Somber Genius

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 19, 2018

... The director of Rosenstrasse, Rosa Luxemburg and Sheer Madness is tracking Bergman, toasting him and his work with his collaborators and some high-profile fans
Ben Is Back Pits a Dazzling Julia Roberts Against the Opioid Scourge

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 18, 2018

With the quickest blink or nervy glance, Roberts communicates to us both what her character, an ordinary woman named Holly Burns, has convinced everyone around her to think she’s feeling but also all of her secret doubts, fury and anguish
Emily Blunt Rules, and Mary Poppins Returns Is Not at All Atrocious

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 18, 2018

True to the spirit of the chipper, somewhat aimless live-action Disney day killers that inspired it, Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns gets better the further it wanders from its actual story.
Aquaman Proves Superheroes Are Better Down Where It’s Wetter

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 17, 2018

Not incidental to Aquaman’s pleasures is its vision of a mixed-race hero, played by a mixed-race actor, fighting to protect and understand clashing aspects of his heritage
In Mary Queen of Scots, Great Women Face Hard Truths About Wielding Power

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 17, 2018

The actresses share only one scene in the film, but Mary Queen of Scots sets them up in counterpoint, two divergent approaches to the question of how women who wield power can actually govern the men around them
Cities Roll, Fight and Eat Each Other in the Otherwise Meh Mortal Engines

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 12, 2018

The film plays as if a three-hour epic has been sliced down to size in the editing, but only the scenes establishing character and context have been cut
Emma Stone and The Favourite’s Royal Women Scheme Deliciously

By Bilge Ebiri
Dec 11, 2018

It’s the early 18th century, there’s a war on with France, and the persistently ill, somewhat childish Anne struggles both to assert her authority and to preserve her kingdom and her crown
Into the Spider-Verse Is the Best Superhero Movie Since The Dark Knight

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 10, 2018

It sets a host of alternative Spider-folk running amok in the New York City of Brooklyn teen Miles Morales, the mixed-race Spider-Man (his father is black and his mother Latinx) invented for the comics in 2011 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli
Kore-eda’s Big-Hearted Shoplifters Toasts the Family That Steals Together

By Bilge Ebiri
Dec 10, 2018

Based on a collection of true news items about exactly what the film’s title promises, Kore-eda’s story centers around a household that at first might appear to be a somewhat ordinary family that has merely fallen on hard times
As Fascism Rises, Schindler’s List Has Become Almost Radical

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 4, 2018

Today, I’m still awed by the film’s scope and scale, by its relentless energy and attention to detail, by its interest in faces and names and coats and belongings
With Mowgli, Netflix Has Its First Blockbuster

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 4, 2018

This time, though, the lessons are urgent, the jungle threatened by man, the wicked tiger Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) a true terror vowing to one day taste that boy’s blood
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma Is a Masterpiece of Memory

By Yolanda Machado
Dec 3, 2018

The writer-director shot Roma in chronological order, without showing the cast the script, unveiling it to the actors the same way it is for the audience, piece by piece, a chance to marinate in each moment as it plays out
Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate Invites Us to Look Through Van Gogh’s Eyes

By Alan Scherstuhl
Dec 3, 2018

Probing the painter’s senses as he tramps about the south of France, Schnabel’s film is drunk with light, a little touched in the head itself, giving over to van Gogh’s perspective through gorgeously disorienting POV shots ...
Netflix’s Exquisite Happy as Lazzaro Asks: What’s to Live for After a Life of Toil?

By Alan Scherstuhl
Nov 27, 2018

This time, we meet the sharecropping peasants of the remote village of Inviolata, living lives of seasonal toil, lives that look — except for the occasional radio or lightbulb — like they might have a century or so ago
Peter Bogdanovich’s The Great Buster Sits Back and Gapes at a Legend

By Alan Scherstuhl
Nov 26, 2018

... The Great Buster at heart is an opportunity to hang with Bogdanovich as he screens favorite sequences from ol’ stone face’s 1920s two- and five-reel masterpieces
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning Torches Sex, Obsession and Class

By Bilge Ebiri
Nov 21, 2018

Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film
Border Lays Bare the Heart of a Troll — a Fantasy Troll, Not the Evil Kind

By Bilge Ebiri
Nov 21, 2018

All we know of our protagonist Tina (a very good Eva Melander) at first is that she is a quiet, somber Swedish customs guard working a border crossing and is also, as it happens, quite distinctive-looking

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