Latest Film Reviews

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Columbus (2017)

Kogonada’s cleverly integrated use of the architecture, beautifully framed from visual and narrative standpoints, lends his freshman feature a sense of modernist mastery...
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

A strange and beautiful beast indeed, Blade Runner 2049 is a science-fiction epic for adults, somehow released in 2017...Blade Runner 2049 dreams big.
American Made (2017)

Seal’s story is a fascinating one worth investigating...As played by Cruise, he’s like Maverick gone to seed.
Stronger (2017)

Catches one off guard with the characters’ open-hearted gestures under duress...feels as if it single-handedly restores humanity to the movies.
American Assassin (2017)

Has a mindset trapped in the 1980s, when Chuck Norris ruled the roost of disposable shoot-em-ups. This repulsive macho fantasy seems expressly designed to appeal to the readers of Soldier of Fortune Magazine.
The Mummy (2017)

As a story to speak to our hearts and minds, it's an utter failure, and perhaps so too even as a disposable corporate product.
It (2017)

Strong performances and production carry the day. This pop culture psychodrama still works, and linked up to its pending sequel should add up to a bit more than the sum of its parts.
Certain Women (2016)

Reichardt in no way pushes her material, instead giving the viewer the space to live in this space with the characters, observe them and listen to them, and then draw one’s own conclusions about thematic import.
The Trip to Spain (2017)

If the dish has lost its pizazz, it remains comfort food for comedy connoisseurs.
Logan Lucky (2017)

Soderbergh’s here to have fun, and his mood is contagious.
Annabelle: Creation (2017)

On paper, Annabelle: Creation lays out lazy character development and logic, but on screen, it gets the job done more often than not as an unpretentious talk-back-to-the-screen audience picture.
Atomic Blonde (2017)

Isn’t about anything more than the spy game and how to make it to the end of the board...Then, too, there is Theron, whose kind of un-performance in repose keeps breaking out into ferocious fighting that suggests a feral Jackie Chan.
Landline (2017)

Slate cements her status as a kind of later-day Lucille Ball, gifted in physical comedy and possessed of a dithering combination of smarts and free-flowing emotion.
Dunkirk (2017)

Rigorously staged and artfully photographed...Christopher Nolan applies his trademark ingenuity and clockwork precision to an otherwise straightforward story.
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

Evokes the sort of tough-minded historical war drama John Milius used to write, with an eye on what war can do to the individual.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

An action-packed, beat-the-heat distraction...Lands close enough to the summer-movie sweet spot that the quibbles feel a bit churlish.
The Big Sick (2017)

Functions...not only as a boilerplate rom-com that’s consistently amusing and possessed with charming leads, but also as a heartwarming drama.
Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

Military-Industrial Uncomplicated...Despite the theme that “Magic does exist” (“It was found long ago. Inside a crashed alien ship”), The Last Knight is all mirthless jokes and thrill-less mayhem.
Beatriz at Dinner (2017)

It’s no great leap to see Strutt as Trumpian, but Beatriz at Dinner has bigger fish to fry than any one figure...make[s] our nation's political intractability the stuff of comedy and...dramatizes the spiritual exhaustion of our time.
Cars 3 (2017)

Gets the franchise back on track with a story that U-turns to the heart of the 2006 original.
Wonder Woman (2017)

A sturdy origin story, this education of Miss Diana Prince, establishing her as a compassionate badass who consistently proves her bravery, strength, and commitment to justice.
Everything, Everything (2017)

Soft-touch kids may enjoy the smooth-jazz romance of this ludicrous fantasy, with true love challenged by caring but misguided parental overprotectiveness, but the story fails to deal honestly with its what-if scenarios.
The Space Between Us (2017)

Despite the multiple genres, The Space Between Us feels thin in its plot, and corny in the telling...
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

This newfangled Arthur comes up short on grandeur or even old-fashioned matinee adventure, trading them in for cosmetic Game of Thrones grot.
A Dog's Purpose (2017)

In this sort of Quantum Leap for dogs, a soulful, gender-confused, repeatedly reincarnated canine goes on a magical journey of Hollywood formula. Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure manipulation.
Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent (2016)

Tower only reveals what he’s willing to reveal...Still, the focus should remain, and does, on the food itself, and the tenacious, productively persnickety, beautiful mind it took to serve it up.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

The pivotal realization--that, in the end, using your heart beats using your head--works as a pithy instruction manual for this diverting but disposable adventure.
Norman (2016)

Norman’s thoughtful dramatic construction, built around a central symbol of a pair of shoes, addresses politician’s voracious desire to 'go places,' ever outpacing forethought of where that ambition will take them...
Woman of the Year (1942)

An effervescent but edgy rom-com about love, career, the insecurities men and women felt (and, sadly, still feel to some extent) around burgeoning feminism.
Colossal (2016)

We find ourselves, with Gloria, neck-deep in an allegory of id. You can hope and pray otherwise, but your inner demons will always come out: some way, somehow, some day.
Frantz (2016)

Interjections of color—and the narrative implications of them—are but one way in which Ozon creates and subverts expectations...Ozon remains interested in the stories people tell to one another, the horrible truths and the comfortable lies.
Going in Style (2017)

Polished but hollow...It’s another sign of the times that Hollywood thinks we can no longer handle the original storyline.
Rogue One (2016)

Will give die-hard Star Wars fans multiple orgasms...runneth over with Star Wars spectacle.
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)

A deeply disturbing study of mass hysteria, a lasting cultural document of "a shameful memory"...and a culturally specific but widely relevant snapshot of that late-'60s moment of student rebellion being met by violent institutional crackdowns.
20th Century Women (2016)

Empathetic and self-searching...a highly witty, deeply humane look at people who may be too conscious for their own good, people who think and feel too much ever to be truly happy.
The Boss Baby (2017)

Fairly one-note in its humor, and not as lively as you would assume it would be [but with] all-around strong voice work and a predictably sweet message about sharing the love...it’s all, as they say, good enough for government work.
The Last Word (2017)

A serious case of the cutes...Pellington knows his movie is more or less bad, but Shirley there’s an audience for it.
Personal Shopper (2016)

A meditation about our own ephemerality on this supposedly corporeal plane. In the end, the truly inescapable horrors are, sure, okay, death, but also living with one’s own mind and the uncertainties of human existence.
Sing (2016)

Sing is pleasant enough...but scrutinize it, and you'll find that it's neither very musically accomplished nor very funny. The tone is bright and colorful but still evinces a kind of joyless duty...
Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Pound for pound, scene for scene, there’s not a sequence here that the original film doesn’t execute better in the clean lines of hand-drawn animation and the crisp vocals of the original cast.

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