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3/4
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Wicked Little Letters
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Wicked Little Letters loses a certain amount of strength as it goes along, through no fault of Colman, Spall, Buckley, Atkins .... It loses force in proportion to the filmmakers’ attempt to turn the work into a critique of patriarchy and misogyny.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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2/4
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Fallen Leaves
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Fallen Leaves has humorous and moving moments, but they are too few in number. In general, the self-consciously restrained style is irritating, not illuminating. It closes the film off to life, rather than opening it up.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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4/4
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To a Land Unknown
(2024)
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David Walsh
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To a Land Unknown is able to draw power and significance from contemporary events because it is already oriented toward the great questions of our time.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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One Life
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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For filmmaking to portray the barbarism of fascism in all its aspects therefore retains its burning relevance and necessity.
Posted Aug 26, 2024
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The Killer
(2023)
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David Walsh
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The Killer is not a good film, it is misguided from beginning to end. Why should anyone care about the central character or most of the others?
Posted Jul 11, 2024
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2/4
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Hit Man
(2023)
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David Walsh
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What Hit Man entirely fails to examine is the more obvious, glaring matter: the intense brutality of American life.
Posted Jul 03, 2024
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2/4
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Emily the Criminal
(2022)
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David Walsh
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Writer-director Ford, who introduces intriguing social facts into his work, seems unclear himself about the driving forces in the drama.
Posted Jul 03, 2024
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Art College 1994
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Liu is an intelligent and thoughtful artist, and, as the portrait of a group of artists as young people, his film is charming and amiable, occasionally moving and unsettling. The central problem ... lies in its essential intellectual amorphousness.
Posted Jun 05, 2024
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Thieves Like Us
(1974)
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Joanne Laurier
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The film was made at a time of upheaval and convulsion, even chaos, qualities that the master improviser Altman thrived on. The period’s rebelliousness undoubtedly played a role in making Thieves Like Us one of his most compelling films.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Empty Nets
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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Empty Nets is an affecting film. Cinematographer Ashkan Ashkani adds to the strong, suggestive atmosphere, contrasting the natural turbulence of the ocean to the violence of an irrational social order.
Posted May 30, 2024
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The Teacher
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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The immense moral and political pressures brought to bear on the Palestinian population ... bring to mind similar strains and terrors for people in those portions of Europe and elsewhere under Nazi rule during World War II.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Woodland
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Woodland ... imagines it can deal in a genuinely meaningful manner with the consequences of a terrorist attack as a purely personal psychological event, without ever exploring ... the nature ... of the attack or the character of the society...
Posted May 30, 2024
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2/4
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Sidonie In Japan
(2023)
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David Walsh
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It’s difficult to imagine an artist in any earlier period praising incomprehension as “a good thing.”
Aside from a passing reference to the family of Sidonie’s Japanese publisher having “died in Hiroshima,” there is not much of substance here.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Agent of Happiness
(2024)
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David Walsh
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Objectively speaking, the people in Bhutan are no happier than people anywhere else living in an economically unequal, unjust and oppressive society ... the responses ... are not so different than one would expect to find in any part of the world.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Heartless
(2023)
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David Walsh
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The scenes between Heartless and her (real-life) widowed father are the strongest, most moving in the film. When he sees her attempting to mend a net, he grabs it out of her hands ... this unforgiving life is the opposite of what he wants for her.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Coup de Chance
(2023)
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David Walsh
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With extraordinary hypocrisy and dishonesty, Hollywood, well-known for its high ethical standards and sexual piety, has blacklisted Allen, along with French-Polish director Roman Polanski.
Posted May 30, 2024
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Joan Baez I Am a Noise
(2023)
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David Walsh
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I Am a Noise sheds relatively little light on Baez’s artistic and social development, and what light it sheds on her inner life seems distorted. It is even less illuminating in regard to the period in which the singer came to prominence, the early 1960s.
Posted Mar 29, 2024
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The Zone of Interest
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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The Zone of Interest is a misguided and disoriented work, one that conceals the concrete historical circumstances that produced someone like Höss, and therefore weakens the ability of the population today to defeat and destroy the fascist menace.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
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American Fiction
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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In the end, what the film counterposes to “black trauma porn,” as Monk refers to it, which coins fortunes from backwardness, is a bland middle class household full of doctors.
Posted Feb 23, 2024
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The Holdovers
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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A pleasant, digestible film and the three leads are appealing. ... It is not a genuine advance for the director. The comedy-drama’s general trajectory and ultimately heartwarming denouement are set out for all to see virtually from its opening sequence.
Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Poor Things
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Bella comes to identify herself and her possibilities ... in accordance with Goethe’s notion that “Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world … Each new object truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.”
Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Napoleon
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Napoleon is a shallow collection of impressions, “psychological” insight of the dime-store variety and brief battle scenes, which are not even presented so as to explain Napoleon’s military prowess.
Posted Feb 02, 2024
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Past Lives
(2023)
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David Walsh
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This is not a bad film, but it is an intensely and conspicuously middle class film.
Posted Feb 02, 2024
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2/4
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May December
(2023)
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David Walsh
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There are intriguing and subtle observations here about the self-centeredness of certain social layers, but not much more.
Posted Dec 30, 2023
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2/4
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Between Two Worlds
(2021)
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David Walsh
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Overall, although Between Two Worlds is sincere enough, it has a rather tepid, unadventurous character. The subject matter is worthwhile, but the film is hardly ground-breaking.
Posted Nov 02, 2023
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The Present
(2020)
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Joanne Laurier
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The short film treats the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, focusing on the brutal checkpoint system.
Posted Nov 02, 2023
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El Conde
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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Chilean director Pablo Larraín ... has made a horror-satire, the award-winning El Conde (The Count), which imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire. It is a complicated, dark, disturbing film about fascism, bourgeois corruption and counterrevolution.
Posted Nov 02, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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David Walsh
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This is an appalling episode and an entirely legitimate subject for a film ... However, Scorsese does not treat the subject well. The three-and-a-half hour work is muddy, murky, repetitive and misanthropic, and even interminable in certain stretches.
Posted Nov 02, 2023
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2/4
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Asteroid City
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Two themes or moods seem to predominate in Asteroid City: first, despite the entertaining-humorous elements, a general melancholy, a restrained, hushed quality; second, the sense that the writer-director is to a considerable extent overwhelmed by events.
Posted Aug 15, 2023
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Barbie
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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Barbie is strained and smug without much wit. One should bear in mind that Mattel, with revenue of $42 billion in 2022, partnered with Warner Bros. on the making of the movie.
Posted Jul 29, 2023
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Oppenheimer
(2023)
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David Walsh
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Oppenheimer is a serious and appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It is intended to leave viewers shaken, and it succeeds in that.
Posted Jul 28, 2023
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Guantanamo Diary Revisited
(2022)
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Joanne Laurier
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In Guantánamo Diary Revisited, Slahi—who endured countless forms of abuse at the hands of the nefarious “special projects” team between 2002 and 2004—and the filmmakers attempt to track down his torturers in the military and intelligence apparatus.
Posted Jul 20, 2023
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Chevalier
(2022)
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David Walsh
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Chevalier is seriously marred, not only by the gravitational pull of identity-racial politics but by a generally low level of historical knowledge and understanding.
Posted Jul 05, 2023
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King Coal
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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The present actuality of mine closures, devastated towns, COVID pandemic and a drug epidemic cannot be scrubbed away with fetching façades and charming dance moves.
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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Bad Press
(2023)
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Joanne Laurier
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Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s Bad Press opens with the revealing fact that only five of 574 sovereign Native American nations legally guarantee freedom of the press,
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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Daughter of Rage
(2022)
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Joanne Laurier
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To borrow a phrase, ideas never lead beyond the status quo but only beyond the ideas of the status quo (and sometimes not even that). Baumeister’s film is gut-wrenching, but the viewer is left hanging because of a lack of context.
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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The Tuba Thieves
(2023)
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David Walsh
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All in all, The Tuba Thieves too rambles aimlessly, hoping apparently that it will stumble by accident on important truths about sound, music and listening. Genuine insight does not emerge by accident.
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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Milisuthando
(2023)
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David Walsh
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The film points to various dilemmas, but it is short of important conclusions. It is easier to have feelings and intuitions, and injured feelings, than definite and substantive ideas.
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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The March on Rome
(2022)
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David Walsh
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Cousins makes only a fleeting reference to World War I and no mention at all of the wave of militant strikes that erupted in postwar Italy, culminating in the mass occupations of factories and shipyards in 1920.
Posted May 27, 2023
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2/4
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Tori and Lokita
(2022)
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David Walsh
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It is rather drab and dull, without many compelling moments. Earnestness and conscientiousness are no substitute for artistic flair.
Posted May 27, 2023
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American: An Odyssey to 1947
(2022)
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David Walsh
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American: An Odyssey to 1947 is a valuable and intriguing documentary film written and directed by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Danny Wu. It centers on the artistic and political evolution of US film director Orson Welles.
Posted May 27, 2023
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4/4
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My Lost Country
(2022)
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David Walsh
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My Lost Country is a moving and poetically evocative film ... A piece of autobiography ... the work is intended ... as “an act of resistance” against the imperialist devastation of Iraqi culture and society.
Posted May 27, 2023
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The Whale
(2022)
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David Walsh
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One of the most deplorable elements of The Whale is its near celebration of defeat and resignation. The decision by Charlie to eat himself to death is treated as a meaningful act of self-sacrifice. Why would this possibly be so?
Posted Mar 24, 2023
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Aftersun
(2022)
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David Walsh
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The film is small, discreet, intimate, a little coy—at times, a bit self-involved and inward-turning. The somewhat self-conscious insistence on the lack of great drama can be tedious at times.
Posted Mar 24, 2023
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Babylon
(2022)
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Joanne Laurier
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Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.
Posted Mar 24, 2023
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The Swimmers
(2022)
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Joanne Laurier
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The Swimmers indelibly depicts the horrors of the refugee crisis. ... The film makes no attempt, however, to explore why millions of Syrians, for example, have been forced to flee their homeland or to name those responsible.
Posted Mar 24, 2023
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Living
(2022)
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Joanne Laurier
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The film’s thrust is humane, but its themes and satirical efforts are somewhat diluted and diffuse.
Posted Feb 26, 2023
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
(2022)
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David Walsh
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A drama along those lines can be trite ... or it may find something fresh and original to say. But if a filmmaker simply wants to do a “love story” about people from opposed social backgrounds, he or she has no real need of Lawrence’s novel.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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To Leslie
(2022)
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David Walsh
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To Leslie is not flawless, it has contrived and overwrought elements, but it unquestionably and sincerely strives for psychological and social realism. Riseborough is no doubt a fearless and committed performer.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Voodoo Macbeth
(2021)
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David Walsh
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Like so many artists at present, taking the line of least resistance, Voodoo Macbeth’s makers largely project their own limited concerns and interests back into the past. The results are weak, flat and muddled.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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