The Snowman★ Now playing In theory, there’s a good movie swirling around The Snowman. The drab, snowy Norwegian setting is an effective canvas for a Nordic noir. The film has an award-winning director in Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), two Oscar-winning editors, a pair of Oscar-nominated screenwriters, and […]
Neil Morris
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Movie Review: Blade Runner 2049 Reminds Us It Works Best to Mess with the Classics When There’s Actually Something Wrong with Them
Blade Runner 2049 ★★★★ Now playing Blade Runner was influential and groundbreaking cinema, a science-fiction film noir that applied classic philosophical and religious themes, particularly on creation and mortality, to humankind’s technological and moral trajectory. It is also insistently inscrutable and bears the scar tissue of excessive, repeated editing, first in a futile effort to […]
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Movie Review: In Battle of the Sexes, Billie Jean King Overhand Smashes a Paper-Thin Glass Ceiling
Battle of the Sexes★★★½ Now playing The most pitched battle in Battle of the Sexes is not strictly on the tennis court. Odds makers and popular opinion alike were very much against Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) in her famous 1973 tennis match against Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). The question the match posed was not […]
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Movie Review: In American Made, Tom Cruise Is Back in the Cockpit—But For Coke, Not Country
American Made ★★★½ Now playing In Top Gun, a young Tom Cruise played an eighties-era pilot in the service of the U.S.A. More than thirty years later, Cruise—still flashing a cocksure facade of pearly whites and aviator shades—goes back to the eighties to portray the real-life pilot Barry Seal, a cynical analog to that previous […]
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Genesis, the Gospels, and Revelation Plunge Through a Psych-Horror Looking Glass in mother!
MOTHER! Now playing In Darren Aronofsky’s Rorschach test of a film, a husband (Javier Bardem), identified only as “Him,” is a poet with writer’s block. Meanwhile, his wife (Jennifer Lawrence), identified only as “Mother,” tends to their Victorian fixer-upper. Their tranquility is interrupted when he brings home a mysterious man (Ed Harris), soon followed by […]
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The LEGO Ninjago Movie Is What Skeptics Initially Feared the Franchise Would Be
The LEGO Ninjago Movie Opening Friday, Sep. 22 The latest LEGO flick is what skeptics initially feared the franchise would be, before Phil Lord and Christopher Miller elevated The LEGO Movie into something witty and poignant. Charlie Bean applies his safe Cartoon Network sensibility to this spinoff about young ninjas protecting the land of Ninjago. […]
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Crown Heights Solemnly Exposes a Flawed Criminal Justice System but Lacks Narrative Panache
CROWN HEIGHTS Opening Friday, Sep. 8 Crown Heights, Matt Ruskin’s biopic of Colin Warner, solemnly and ably exposes the outrages of a flawed criminal justice system. But outside of a few interesting wrinkles, it’s an unremarkable exercise in a cinematic trope, the “wrong man” story, which dates back at least to Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. […]
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Brigsby Bear Concocts a Sweet Deception to Make an Acid Point About Mass Media
BRIGSBY BEAR Opening Friday, August 18 Brigsby Bear is a send-up of how popular entertainment coopts our consciousness that also cheekily casts the actor who played Luke Skywalker. Its compelling but sometimes inconsistent narrative layers are the byproduct of a brazenly offbeat comedy that isn’t always attuned to its own satirical rhythms. Holding it together […]
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Movie Review: Atomic Blonde Is More Like Dime-Store John le Carré than Joan Wick or Jane Bond
Atomic Blonde★★★ Now playing There’s a futile fatalism floating around Atomic Blonde, set in 1989 during the days leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The East-versus-West spy game still carries life-or-death stakes, but it also feels propelled by a dutiful inertia, predestined to play out like the gunslingers in Once Upon a […]
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Movie Review: Like the Films of Terrence Malick, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk Is Both Epic and Meditative
Dunkirk ★★★½ Now playing The evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk in 1940 holds an iconic, solemn place in British culture. Any film made about this historical flashpoint will have a prewired emotional impact for English audiences, as movies about Pearl Harbor or 9/11 do for Americans. In Dunkirk, British director Christopher Nolan assumes, […]