Film Reviews, page 2

I really want to follow Yang on Instagram and cry at his intensely beautiful and melancholy Live Photos.

Gets better every time.

The tone is pitch-perfect — the aesthetic, the performances, down to how karmically predictable some of the twists are. Love all the little props, such delicate artefacts, all feeling like they could tell a whole story. I couldn’t stop thinking of Ricky Jay, and now I find myself wishing for a Del Toro film about him. Or maybe just the objects he left behind.

For nearly two hours, the entire world disappeared and I wanted nothing more than to see a dog trust a robot.

I couldn’t possibly predict twists this dumb, and that just made them all the more effective. Hats off to this movie!

John Wick has been losing its way but this movie knows what it’s all about. A blur of a 90-minute punch in the face — just enough to put you in the hospital, not enough to kill you of overstimulation.

I learned that Toni Collette is australian in real life. Next: do solar storms actually look like that? This movie is great at making me want to check Wikipedia.

Release, at last.

Like leafing through a big coffee table book. Not particularly insightful, but very nice pictures.

The uncanny valley between the ponderous Godzilla 2014 and the bombastically campy Godzilla vs. Kong. I’m sorry but if you want to make a serious movie you have to stick to the serious monsters, you can’t put on the three-headed electric dragon and big moth. Pokémon aren’t scary.

Silly as heck. No hesitation. This movie delivers.

More exciting than I remembered, but still disappointing and, at best, inessential. It tries too hard, and also not hard enough. Like most TV-to-film adaptations, the texture feels wrong. Character-wise, the plot isn’t much more than condensed retreading of old ground. And worst of all, it shows too much! It’s certainly a big-screen adventure, but the desire for one-upmanship has the side effect of making the world, the conspiracies, and even the aliens seem small and shallow.

Gotta get over the bar

A very cool sensorial experience, but emotionally shallow. It tries, but there’s too much time bullshit for character motivations and plot structure to survive. A movie made for endless YouTube explainers.

Solid genre entertainment. Not much more than what I expected, but it’s well done, straightforward, looked cool. 90 minutes club!

Kirsten Stewart has the best shaky hands I’ve ever seen on film. This movie is worth watching for her performance alone. The rest of the cast was… okay.

In the end I was left with some questions: Was this at some point meant to be a Cloverfield sequel? Why does it look like it was edited for commercial breaks? Were the voice-overs really necessary? Was the girlboss-beat-drop end credits song picked by a focus group?

I’m glad women can use violence for good too, but this movie is… kinda basic? It’s as if they couldn’t get approval for “girl power” without putting in some bad tropes and clichés to balance it out. Yes, representation matters, but it depresses me that this is what we’re settling for as progress. Excusing it as an escapist piece of pulpy action would be fine, but I don’t think it’s very good at that, either.