Letterboxd — Your life in film

At its best when delivering lean, kinetic genre thrills, at its worst when it becomes yet another horror-parable for overcoming grief and trauma. The first (and strongest) act plays like a straight-to-streaming mix of Home Alone and Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which is fun, but the film literally loses the plot once we venture into heady allegorical territory. I would have preferred it if this had been 90 straight minutes of "Dever vs. aliens", because that's a strong enough…

Citizen Kane for the “should have been gayer” crowd.

I do feel that people are being a bit hyperbolic about how great this is, but it’s still pretty fn great. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri are obvious generational talents and Emma Seligman is now two-for-two as a director, but above all else, Bottoms’ greatest strength is that it’s not trying to be anything other than itself. The last decade-plus of comedy has seen a string of studios try and fail…

It’s so wild that this came out two years after Kramer vs. Kramer – the two quintessential divorce movies released one right after the other. One’s a straightforward legal drama, the other’s a nightmarish fever dream. One’s set in New York, the other somewhere in the seventh circle of hell. One examines the fallout of a divorce from the outside looking in, the other dissects a marriage from the inside out, spilling its gory secrets and destroying everything in its…

“Feeling good on the inside is all about looking good on the outside.” 

Barbie is getting a ton of praise right now for ushering bimbo feminism into the mainstream, and yes, it does, but The House Bunny already did it in 2008 – the world just wasn’t ready yet. Evidently, the world wasn’t ready for Anna Faris’ genre-defining performance either. How else is it that the MTV Movie Awards were the only ones to recognise the sheer level of greatness…

El Conde is beautifully shot and visually engaging – at least the flying sequences are – but it is not the biting satire Larraín promised. It’s essentially a one-joke premise, and at 111 minutes, that joke loses steam pretty quickly. For most of its runtime, the film rushes through a stream of witty dialogue that’s never quite funny or incisive enough, and the middle act especially completely sucked the life out of me (and not in the good way). Still,…