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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Builds to the fulfillment of the 'MonsterVerse' promise (further teased in a post-credits scene) of monster-on-monster action...It's all very silly...and also a kind of bruising primordial thrill ride.
Get Out (2017)
What's most interesting about
Get Out
is how it taps into the same idea to fuel both its comedy and horror: the recognition of social truths.
Logan (2017)
There's a resonant motif in
Logan
that times have changed for the worst, but this dystopian world revives the humanity in these characters, a development that's all for the best.
A Cure For Wellness (2016)
Distinctive, invigorating creativity at work...far from perfect, but this treat for the eyes with ideas to consider feels like a miracle of a movie by offering so much more than we expect from the jump-scare horror to which we’ve resigned ourselves.
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
Makes the case for the
Wick
franchise as a kind of bizarro James Bond...This antihero may not be licensed to kill, but now he lives in a similarly slick universe of action fantasy and exotic settings.
The LEGO Batman Movie (2017)
Full to bursting with Easter Eggs for longtime Batman fans...Zany, frantically paced, and busy, busy, busy. For some, that...will be a bit exhausting, especially in brain-fatiguing LEGO-construction-block animation.
The Comedian (2016)
Surprise, this is a romantic comedy...this stand-up gives you no reason to sit down.
Gold (2016)
In its broader themes of 'selling a story' to investors and the blinding power of money,
Gold
has little new to offer, but in its particulars...finds deposits rich enough to make the trip worthwhile.
The Founder (2016)
Call it 'Big Mac-beth.'
Silence (2016)
Slow going...But
Silence
also represents consummate filmmaking.
Patriots Day (2016)
'Terror bad. Boston strong.'
Hidden Figures (2016)
Could hardly be more historically important, culturally significant, or inspirational, and as a PG-rated film, it’s especially valuable as a STEM education boost for young girls.
A Monster Calls (2016)
There’s a simple power to the clean lines of Ness’ story, and it’s greatly amplified by the work of the actors.
Why Him? (2016)
Nothing if not formulaic, but it has its passing charms...Ultimately, the hacky plot (partly credited to Franco’s buddy Jonah Hill) is also too primal not to work...
Assassin's Creed (2016)
Despite its style points, fails to resonate on a higher octave than its low hum of dark doings, leaping around, and fisticuffs.
Fences (2016)
An American classic writ large.
Jackie (2016)
The serviceable movie you make about this subject. But it does offer a little bit more, peeking through with an interesting insight every quarter-hour or so.
Passengers (2016)
What begins as an intriguing premise based on high-stakes “what if”s shrinks in imagination as the pair begins to face crises akin to a
Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode...
Collateral Beauty (2016)
Chicken Poop for the Soul...
Office Christmas Party (2016)
Well, why don’t you just tell me what you think
Office Christmas Party
is about, and I’ll tell you if you’re right. Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah, you’ve got it.
Miss Sloane (2016)
[Not] a truly thoughtful and credible treatment of the unpleasant realities of Washington lobbying...[but] a hothouse melodrama that teases an ice queen’s meltdown while actually doing the hustle.
Rules Don't Apply (2016)
In his screenplay and performance as Hughes, Beatty offers a canny, sharply drawn, and highly personal take on the billionaire, with strong elements of lacerating self-parody.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)
I have heard the cash cow moo...the sort of movie many will feel obliged to like more than they actually want to clamor right back onto the ride.
Loving (2016)
An easy realism and an intimate domestic perspective on events that became consequential to national history...replacing histrionics with a genuine curiosity about what it must have been like to live this story from the inside.
Arrival (2016)
A science-fiction masterpiece that’s largely about our perceptions of time and our struggles to communicate...unexpectedly romantic and profound in its deeper concerns, by exploring the happy-sad nature of existence itself, of being born to die.
The Eagle Huntress (2016)
As a documentary, it’s only marginally more credible than
Nanook of the North
. So have we really come a long way, baby?
The Handmaiden (2016)
A conspicuously crafty tale...Park’s erotic thriller...with its story that, not coincidentally, deals with fetishes—never feels lifelessly premeditated; rather, we realize, early and often, that we are in very sure hands.
A Man Called Ove (2015)
Though Holm’s film can be plenty sentimental and emotionally manipulative, it also manages to be
about
sentiment and emotional manipulations, and how those aren’t necessarily bad things.
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