Search for 2019

Little Women is a like Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice – the story is so well-known (and well-loved) that any new motion picture adaptation becomes more about screenwriting choices (what’s left in and what’s taken out) and performances. C...

When I see a romantic comedy, I’m not expecting Ozu or Bergman or Truffaut or Scorsese. All I want – and I think it’s a perfectly reasonable desire considering the genre – is to fall in love with the characters as they fall in love wit...

On the surface, Ma is seemingly just another entry into the generic horror/thriller category about a seemingly good-hearted stranger who worms her way into the bosom of a group before showing her true (psychopathic) tendencies. Although these ...

This review contains (oblique) spoilers.When Disney released Maleficent in 2014, it was a fresh approach to the Sleeping Beauty story – a live-action re-interpretation of the fairy tale with the supposed villain recast as a sympathetic figur...

Marriage Story is the best thing Noah Baumbach has done since his 2005 breakthrough, The Squid and the Whale. Since then, Baumbach has spent a great deal of time exploring mumblecore, polishing his indie credentials, and following in the foots...

When watching something like Mary, it’s useful to remember that actors, like all of us, have mouths to feed and bills to pay. That’s why an Oscar winner like Gary Oldman and a respected actress like Emily Mortimer can find themselves adrif...

If I used words like “tiresome” and “lazy” to describe this pointless remake/reboot, it wouldn’t be sufficient to express the apathy I feel for Columbia Pictures’ sad attempt to exhume a franchise that was pronounced dead by the ti...

Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has described his brand of filmmaking as “existential horror.” To be sure, it’s a much different breed of the genre than one typically finds in multiplexes, trading in jump scares for ...

Miss Bala is a reworking of a 2011 Mexican film. Although the movies may share the same name, they have different agendas. The original Miss Bala focused more on the dramatic elements than the action/thriller ones and wasn’t afraid to get d...

The Mustang is an unconventional tale of redemption that earns its upbeat ending by not falling prey to every cliché of the genre or giving in to the temptation to become too maudlin or sentimental. Although actress-turned-director Laure de ...