Movie Reviews (Chronological)
High Fidelity (2002)
Digging through the archives, I’ve found an old favorite and I’m taking it for a spin. Here’s my original Year 2000 review of High Fidelity.
Ash is Purest White (2019)
Jia Zhangke delivers a wildly ambitious epic of a gangster’s girlfriend thrown overboard into Chinese capitalism’s unmerciful storms. Go see it. (Caution: Part Two of this essay examines the film’s confounding conclusion, so — spoilers!)
Shrek (2001)
Lo and behold—archaeologists digging deep in the Looking Closer archives have unearthed Overstreet’s original 2001 review of Shrek.
Chungking Express (1994)
A brief reflection on Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.
Elf (2003)
Imagine… a new band of superheroes made up of characters who were raised by inhuman species: Princess Mononoke, raised by a wolf goddess! Mowgli, hero of the jungle, raised by wolves! Tarzan, another hero of the jungle, raised by apes! Peter Pan, who was raised...
24 Frames (2018)
In which Overstreet returns to writing about movies for Good Letters with a celebration of Abbas Kiarostami’s final, enigmatic, meditative movie.
A Star is Born (2018)
Bradley Cooper’s big remake of A Star is Born strums all those predictable chords so hard, all the strings start breaking.
Ready Player One (2018)
Spielberg gets lost in nostalgia, serving up a flashy but frustrating contradiction.
The Beguiled (2017)
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock — the 1975 film that set the tonal template for Sofia Coppola’s films — is more powerfully present here than in any of her previous work, even The Virgin Suicides. Again, we have women and girls in isolation, imprisoned...
Baby Driver (2017) – a review and mixtape
[This review is made possible by the Looking Closer Specialists — a generous crew who support this website. Thank you, Specialists, for understanding the time and resources that are necessary to keep a site like this alive. You are my best audience, and more: you are...