A beautifully written, impeccably directed film made for people who passionately love movies by a filmmaker who passionately loves movies. Finds such a perfect line between emotional vulnerability and levity; this is comfortably the funniest film I’ve seen all year. For those worried this indulges heavily in schmaltz, rest assured it isn’t anywhere near as sentimental as the trailer makes it out to be, and is instead much more of a healthy balance between comedic, melancholic, and bittersweet.…
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West Side Story 2021
I’m lukewarm on the Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins film, but to say that Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s take on West Side Story blew me away is an understatement. Spielberg had been wanting to make a musical for a very long time, and it shows in every single frame of this. By making alterations from the 1961 film, the 2021 adaptation of West Side Story both stands on its own and largely improves on the original, resulting in yet…
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Mute 2018
I was a mild apologist for this when I covered it for TV and City in 2018, but coming back to it now, I have to say I see myself aligning more with the detractors, even if I don’t think it deserved to be so brutally panned. More than anything, I’m baffled I called this a “visual masterpiece,” because on this viewing, I couldn’t get past how cheap this film looks, almost like it was shot in a…
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To Leslie 2022
Screenwriting 101 hackwork elevated to a fairly decent film by an utterly phenomenal leading turn from Andrea Riseborough. Capital-A Acting performances like this one hardly ever impress me, but this is one of the rare recent exceptions where the mass praise for one is 100% warranted. Despite working with a script that is incredibly schematic and ridden with clichés—including what was probably a mere caricature on paper—and acting against a supporting cast that completely pales in comparison (Allison Janney…
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In the Heights 2021
Remember when musicals used to be made by directors who knew how to shoot and stage them?
Looks and feels far too artificial for it to work, as it is so easy to tell what was shot on location and what was shot on soundstage. It doesn’t help that the narrative and characters are already incredibly shallow in execution and the emotional beats are manufactured and unearned, but it doesn’t work as a musical either, given both the inept blocking/staging…
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Malcolm & Marie 2021
Sam Levinson directly to jail.
It’s painfully obvious from the getgo that Levinson got ridiculously offended by one negative review for Assassination Nation (a film that, despite its many flaws, I found to be a relatively enjoyable work of genre schlock), so much that he made a student film with dialogue that feels like it were written by an Aaron Sorkin-wannabe and made John David Washingnton’s character a stand-in for himself, and that alone creates the problem of thinking he is…
