WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD is a melancholy comedy about blindness and boundaries. Grounded by performances by Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard that are wonders of anger and pain and absurdity, it examines the volatile emotions lurking beneath a family’s thin veneer of civility as it reaches a breaking point when reality intrudes on… Read More »
MISSING
Full of slick misdirections and clever plot twists, MISSING rises above the novelty of its online footage subgenre to take its place as a solid mystery-thriller. Not that it doesn’t take excellent advantage of the limitations of its chosen subgenre. Au contraire, it incorporates those very limitations as integral plot points. In it we find… Read More »
BABYLON
In BABYLON, Damien Chazelle has given us several films about the last hurrah of silent films and the birth of synchronized sound. Some of them are good, some of them are muddled, and one of them is superb. Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to encapsulate a time and place provokes respect for the effort, even when it… Read More »
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
And so, after a gap of over 13 years, James Cameron returns us to Pandora with an introduction that posits the most dangerous thing about that locale is that you may come to love her too much. Cameron is quite obviously smitten with his mythical planet whose inhabitants, the 8-foot-tall Na’avi, are more in tune… Read More »
WOMEN TALKING
WOMEN TALKING is a compassionate, reasoned film about a very ugly subject that tells its compelling story within strict confinements. The action takes place among an Amish-like sect in 2010 as its women take on issues of the patriarchy with a fiercely clear eye and the safe remove of an almost metaphorical setting. Within this… Read More »
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY
At one point during Rian Johnson’s GLASS ONION, one of the character wails “What is reality?” It’s a fair question considering the plot twist that has just been revealed to the suitably colorful cast of characters, and one that neatly sums up why Mr. Johnson’s second installment in the casebook of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig)… Read More »
SHE SAID
SHE SAID is a compelling story that is well told by director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Based on the book of the same name by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, it follows those two New York Times reporters as they crack the story of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape… Read More »
BLACK ADAM
Until now, BATMAN VS SUPERMAN has been the nadir of DC’s excursions into cinema. Now it has lost even that paltry distinction with the onset of BLACK ADAM, a film with much sound and fury that signifies nothing. Not even Dwayne Johnson, one of the most charismatic movie stars working today can right this shipwreck,… Read More »
THE GOOD NURSE
There are two villains in THE GOOD NURSE, the based on the true-crime book by Charles Graeber, and the first English-language film from Tobias Lindholm (ANOTHER ROUND, THE HUNT). One villain is the serial killer, Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) who worked for years as a nurse killing patients while raising suspicions, but never prosecutions, at… Read More »
HALLOWEEN ENDS
HALLOWEEN ENDS fulfills its promise to take the battle between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (unknown shape played by James Jude Courtney) to its limits. Boasting four writers, including director and purveyor of the franchise reboot, David Gordon Green, this excursion takes us, alas, into muddled waters. Myers, on the loose since… Read More »
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