Movie Reviews (Chronological)
Moretz is magnificent as the gremlin-fighting Maude
This isn’t a one-woman show, but it’s close: Chloë Grace Moretz gives this cartoonish action film a far stronger central performance than it needs, and that turns an otherwise forgettable action thriller into surprisingly compelling experience.
Hilarity and hardship: an unforgettable Iranian road movie
The son of the great Jafar Panahi has become a promising filmmaker himself. Panah Panahi’s first movie takes backroads that lead to laughs, surprises, and troubling revelations.
My multi-viewings of the year’s best multi-verse movie
A conversation between moviegoers Cravis Frankly and Jeffrey Overstreet about the most complicated and most exciting multi-verse movie of the year.
Making Marcel the Shell my new mentor…
Marcel is the kind of film that I suspect Jim Henson would have loved: It’s childlike, playful, hopeful and wise — and all of this without ever stooping to sentimentality. Its characters seem to have been brought to life with patience, attention, and love. Just as I have learned more from Kermit the Frog about living a meaningful life than I have from most movie characters, I’m adopting Marcel as a mentor during dark times.
Emergency is not what it looks like
Can this friendship survive the worst night ever? Kunle and Sean — and, to a degree, the cannabis-clouded Carlos — are spiraling down into crisis as they try to save a stranger in this funny but sobering “calamity comedy.”
Cronenberg’s performance-art surgery
In Cronenberg’s latest sci-fi nightmare, human bodies are evolving and surgeons are bringing brand new organs out into the spotlight… in public, as performance art. It’s unsettling. It’s meaningful. And it’s hilarious.
Maverick and Me: Part Two
As an action movie, Top Gun: Maverick is compelling entertainment. As art, it exists more as a celebration of Tom Cruise, exalting a version of reckless masculinity and whiteness that I might have hoped we’d left behind.
Maverick and Me: Part One
Before diving fast and furious into a review of Top Gun: Maverick, I should probably provide some personal history about me and Maverick.
Catch the rare treasure Petite Maman on the big screen if you can
Like Jacques Doillon’s Ponette and John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Céline Sciamma’s new film is about very young children living with loss and grief. And, like those films, it casts an unforgettable spell. Don’t miss it!
Conflicted about The Northman’s conflict
With full respect for arguments to the contrary, I’m of a mind to say that Robert Eggers’s The Northman, while very clearly in the category of “Not My Kind of Movie,” is a complex and meaningful film that deserves heavy cautions, the raising of certain concerns, and considerable praise. Viewer discretion is very forcefully advised.