Movie Reviews (Chronological)
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...
Wonder Woman (2017)
Against all odds and right on time, director Patty Jenkins’s much-anticipated Wonder Woman delivers almost everything a summer moviegoer could hope for, restoring my belief in the importance of the superhero genre and the potential of summer blockbusters. That...
The Unknown Girl (2017)
Before I talk about two brothers from Belgium and review their impressive new murder mystery — The Unknown Girl — I’m going to step up on my soapbox and talk about heroes and villains. Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker have always been, for me, the...
A Quiet Passion (2017)
The brilliant Terence Davies cast — Cynthia Nixon in — A Quiet Passion as the great — Emily Dickinson. The poet’s played by Emma Bell — In the opening scenes — Where Emily embraces doubt — And authenticity. But then — the wonder of the sight — family portraits...
Personal Shopper (2017)
Just as Olivier Assayas’s new film Personal Shopper keeps shapeshifting from horror movie to socio-economic commentary to erotic thriller to paranormal murder mystery… so this review keeps shifting as I write it. I haven’t published my comments until...
Don’t Think Twice (2016)
Improv comedy is a demanding art. Making a movie about an improv team — one that is both dramatic and funny — that’s even more challenging. Mike Birbiglia succeeds!
Get Out (2017)
Earlier this month, my students wrote film reviews of Ava DuVernay’s film Selma. I pulled sentences from each of them and projected them onto a screen, asking the class to help each other repair grammatical errors in some of the weaker sentences. (This is a...