6.5
FAIL STATE Review
Shebanow’s driving energy is always apparent although sometimes it’s left, frustratingly, just out of reach.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
6.5
7.5
FIRST MAN Review
It’s a movie with an unwavering faith in the lessons we can learn from the past, but it shuns inappropriate nostalgia or uncritical revisionism.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
7
SADIE Review
Sadie is, above all, a meditation on life spent without access: to money, to answers, to safe outlets for confusion and anger.
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7.5
TEA WITH THE DAMES Review
The film’s greatest asset is its ability to convey the lively spirit of the conversations without feeling selective or artificially emphasizing points, beyond spare bursts of archival footage or the occasional question posed from Michell himself.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
8
COLD WATER Criterion Blu-ray Review
Cold Water is an absorbing, pensive look at what such desires feel like on the inside, with its handheld close-ups on faces and careful observance at objects and structures, as if to seek answers from everything in equal measure.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
5.5
OPERATION FINALE Review
Operation Finale is the historical film at its most safely crafted, even as individual production elements, such as Alexandre Desplat’s pushy score – heavy on everything from marimbas to choirs – suggest departures from a cookie-cutter approach that aren’t reflected onscreen.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
8
THE WILD BOYS Review
It’s the kind of enigmatic art that contains multitudes but ultimately speaks for itself.
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7
CRAZY RICH ASIANS Review
Crazy Rich Asians is a work of pure intent and wide potential, utilizing Hollywood’s most popular, time-tested devices and razzmatazz with a wise and lovely embrace.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
6.5
TO ALL THE BOYS I’VE LOVED BEFORE Review
As we finally expunge the traumatic memories of The Kissing Booth from our minds, Netflix has delivered To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, a teen comedy just as formulaic, but significantly less appalling.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
5.5
THE MEG Review
Neither inventive enough to wow us, nor lovably dumb enough to cheekily win us over, The Meg winds up in a bland middle, at the intersection where the simplicity of giant sharks and the complexity of tentpole-budgeted film financing and risk assessment meet.
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10
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH Criterion Blu-ray Review
A Matter of Life and Death is aesthetically and thematically governed by images of the planets and stars themselves, always greater than individual hangups.
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5.5
EUTHANIZER Review
Euthanizer’s ideas about human interactions through karmic desire often run flat, as the film’s stylistic choices betray the capabilities of its lead actor and what the script has guided him up to that point.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
6.5
SKYSCRAPER Review
Skyscraper falters when trying to over legitimize its otherwise carefully concocted nonsense.
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6
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Review
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sufficiently smooth entertainment, yet it winds up as more of a test case for future efforts than anything else.
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7.5
BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE Criterion Blu-Ray Review
As the Eric Hynes essay in the Criterion booklet astutely points out, it’s best to consider Moore’s films as a kind of dynamic presentation, mixing traditional storytelling techniques and operatic hellraising with the kind of infuriating horrors that can only come from simply discussing aspects of real life as they stand.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
7
ALEX STRANGELOVE Review
Regardless of the notion that its young target audience is more inclined to stream than to head out to a theater, writer/director Craig Johnson is allowed to play more liberally with profanity, engage with his characters’ sex lives more frankly, and create broadly irreverent running jokes that a major studio would cull into a nicer package.
Posted by: Ken Bakely 0
