For Groucho's fresh picks every week, listen on Soundcloud and subscribe! Look for the "Screen Scene" review segments for my weekly recommendations of 2022 theatrical and Blu-ray releases.
The Best Films of 2022 according to Groucho are now...listed! If you like what you read here, share the love: tell your friends to subscribe to Groucho Reviews' YouTube channel as well as liking the Facebook page, grouchoreviews on Instagram, and Twitter handle...
Offers too much sensational spectacle, melodrama, and high-stakes sci-fi adventure ever to bore its audience, but its echoes of exhausted blockbuster tropes ring hollow. 
A political movie of religious intrigue, well-acted and directed with a good script and great visual appeal. 
A tightrope act to have a conversation about race when your priority is to get laughs. Great cast, but by its climax you feel like the movie's the hammer and you're the nail. 
History on film. Well edited, bleak...vital journalism. 
Charmingly and frighteningly nostalgic, touching on feminist social satire. 
Tonally shifty, overlong, repetitive and as history simplistic, but well-made and an interesting effort to reach across the aisle from the socially liberal to the socially conservative. 
A deliberately paced, bleak, and unsettling morality play that never really gets much traction, spins its heels, and ultimately fails to find a way to make its material interesting. 
Not as hardcore as the in-your-face, bloody, gory, sweaty, dirty, puss-y, oozing, festering, nightmarish 1987 original, but still honors Clive Barker's concept with a stronger, more-interested-in-world-building narrative. 
Brian DePalma's 'earwitness' thriller may just be his best film—strong direction, a good script and self-reflexive in clever meta ways that were before its time. 
Pretty low-key but enjoyable enough medieval coming-of-age comedy boasts a cheeky, naughty sense of humor and a period story complicated by class and the limited mobility of gender. 
A sci-fi romantic light comedy anchored by two charming lead performances which is less interested in laughs than it is in presenting an allegory of damaged people trying to hold on to love and happiness. 
Marginally improved...and Midler, Parker and Najimy still play their characters with the hammy gusto of 1966 Batman villains. 
If you love movies, you definitely want to be in this discussion. 
A spirited, meta, frothy and amusingly arch mystery comedy for theater nerds with a snappy script and a smashing cast. 
Effective in its refusal to spell out diagnoses or adopt a specific analytic take. Instead, it invites interpretation. 
A dark, timely and endlessly fascinating mood piece. Thandiwe Newton is perfection in a deep-dive character study that explores several interesting triangular conflicts. 
Perhaps the definitive documentary on Sidney Poitier, touching upon his cultural significance and challenging position as a transitional and transformative cultural figure. 
A highly interesting document of a pretty potent story told in its entirety. 
A mixed bag, but there are definitely moments where the performances, direction and photography sync up for an effectively moody atmosphere. 
Bold, indulgent, polarizing, poetic, rapturous and artfully made but also an epic-length torment, like the secular The Passion Of The Christ. 
I think one thing actually that sometimes even gay people seem to forget about: there is something extremely sexy about being the only two people in the room who have a secret that no one else knows about. 
It was so much fun. She was slightly, wonderfully over the top, narcissistic, and enjoys life. 
[Martin:] I've read that monkeypox is sexually transmitted, so neither Marty nor I could possibly catch it." [Short:] "Unless you can catch it through batteries." 
I wanted with Joachim to have quirks and certain characteristics that I know from friends and people I've worked with...I love him being over the top and flamboyant, but still grounded, 'cause we all have a friend like that. 
[Grazer:] I feel like Fionn, not only on set but just in life, showed me the ropes as like a brother would do. 
I feel like most of the discussion about the character on this one was about hair. (Laughs.) Hair and facial hair....And they told me to take a look at Chris de Burgh videos. 
I don't want to be on my own island...I'm here to collaborate, not to just be the Grand Poobah of costume design. 
[Burns:] 'The only thing more powerful than telling someone a story they don't know is telling someone a story that they thought they knew'...Whenever I could I used the language and the facts that are in the report to tell the story of the program. 
I'm interested in a democratic narrative...Anyone who is on the screen is interesting. Right? Everyone has their own story. 
I was very lucky to be raised by two strong and very generous women...[Cleo] embodies, in one hand, those scars that I share with my family, but in the other hand, those scars that I share with a whole society. 
