Movie Reviews (Chronological)
Overstreet Archives: 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.
Zhao Tao burns bright in Ash is Purest White
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!)
Overstreet Archives: 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): <500 Words
A brief reflection on Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express.
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...