Excerpt: While everything comes together in the film’s third act, this is the type of film that suffers upon reflection. Still its depiction of slavery presents real, vivid horror and its relevance in today’s troubling times is undeniable
Excerpt: Award-winning musical artist Janelle Monáe stars as a successful author trapped in a horrifying reality as a captive slave in the visually beautiful horror-thriller Antebellum. From directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz in their feature-length debut, the film is a piecemeal of sociopolitical ideas that loosely come together in the end but ultimately, fail to resonate in any meaningful way for making this a memorable production.
Excerpt: Thank the movie heavens for Lionsgate proudly taking a chance on something as audacious, confrontational, and sure to be divisive as “Antebellum.”
Excerpt: While Antebellum is a gorgeous film to look at, and has admirable goals in mind, it misses on most accounts, falls into all-too-common traps, and the end result plays like an overlong episode of Black Mirror.
Excerpt: Those moments that should be powerful end up getting undercut by their surface appeal. The filmmakers’ obvious ambitions fall prey to cinematic convention.
Excerpt: Antebellum suffers from its insistence on exploiting Black pain and an underwritten story that feels confused about what it’s truly trying to say.
Excerpt: Much last this year’s ‘The Hunt’, ‘Antebellum’ is sure to spark controversy and shock viewers into taking a stance, one way or another. And though it may turn some away with its harsh, backdated depictions of racial violence, there’s an urgent core to the film that’s well worth examining.
Excerpt: Rosamund Pike is perfection in this intellectual romance, an unsentimental portrait of a woman striving to be appreciated for her mind at a time even more anti-woman than today. Feminist and flinty.
Excerpt: Director Marjane Satrapi asks why male scientists are allowed to be troubled and awkward while female intellectuals are denied the same courtesy.
Excerpt: His third film finds him adapting Iain Reid’s ‘unfilmable’ award winning debut novel and yet it is unmistakably Kaufman, his themes of identity, depression and doomed relationships now literally shrouded in death.
Excerpt: I’m Thinking of Ending Things combines a darkly comedic tone with a bleak atmosphere to make for a haunting portrait of a relationship on the rocks.
Excerpt: Too audacious and richly designed to outright dismiss but too precious to completely embrace, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” does get one thinking they are having an existential crisis.
Excerpt: With “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” Charlie Kaufman further cements himself as an uncategorizable force to be reckoned with – something cinema can never have enough of.
Excerpt: Charlie Kaufman‘s latest mind-massager is another intensely subjective and literate tour of the lonely corridors of the mind, where nothing is as it seems. It’s one of his strangest offerings— particularly when it reaches an irrational finale that departs from the source novel—but perhaps what distinguishes it the most is the exceptional ensemble acting…
Excerpt: I’m Thinking of Ending Things will probably become a richer experience with repeated viewings. It is a puzzle box of a movie. With his sardonic dark humor and preoccupation with existential crisis, Kaufman has made one of the most challenging and interesting movies of the year.
Excerpt: There are several volumes of sophisticated feminist theory at work, but, trust me, they are wholly in the service of a first-rate action-adventure film that puts characters ahead of spectacle.
Excerpt: Director Niki Caro expertly balances the drama, humour, adventure and action, creating a thrilling big-screen epic with potent emotional resonance and lots of female power
Excerpt: It’s perfectly watchable, and at times, quite enjoyable, but in moments where it seemed like they had the opportunity to do something new and interesting with the material, they decide not to. Instead, relying too heavily on the animated film that already has the audience’s affection.
Excerpt: Given Disney’s current track record of live-action remakes of dearly beloved animated classics, it’s not all that surprising Mulan (2020) is a middle-of-the-road affair, doing much of the same as other Disney remakes with additions and changes that ultimately don’t add a great deal to the original. From Niki Caro, the film shows the potential of striving for something more thoughtful and inspiring for contemporary audiences.
Excerpt: Acceptably inoffensive, if less than wholly engaging. At least Liu’s strong, stately Mulan is a wonderful role model for girls who aren’t much interested in conformity and adhering to expectations.
Excerpt: It has some cute ideas, including its conceptual hook, but for the most part it is another formulaic outing with problematic performances from both of its leads. Thankfully supporting players help buoy the material with snappy, flavorful work.
Excerpt: It finds in this purely ceremonial exercise a stark portrait of a deeply divided country at a crossroads, and in its protagonists’ struggles, a charged journey full of suspense, disappointment, and joy.
Excerpt: riveting…a microcosm of the state of our divided nation as displayed by seventeen year-old boys, predominantly white and conservative, who are at turns impressive, infuriating, silly, mean-spirited, compassionate and frequently surprising.
Excerpt: I watched the new Apple+ and A24 documentary Boys State and, sorry to break it to you, but America is nuts. Like, really. A lot. I’m allergic to nuts—anaphylactic, send me hospital kind of allergic—and I felt as if I were about to break out in hives watching Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ compelling and unsettling new movie.
Excerpt: Boys State is a masterful piece of observational, verité cinema. It’s every bit as engrossing as something like Harlan County, USA – although the stakes of that film, about striking coal miners in Kentucky, are literally life-and-death – and carries on the grand tradition of the direct cinema approach of the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman.
Excerpt: Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” is a sleek, mysterious clockwork which, like its title, flips in its middle and doubles back on itself, exposing its inner machinations. As The Protagonist, John David Washington imbues the director’s chilly aesthetic with humanizing warmth.
Excerpt: Christopher Nolan’s latest brain-bender is an entertaining if rather dense spy thriller, mixing the globe-hopping splendour of a Bond movie with Nolan’s puzzle-style plotting, dropping clues into each Imax-scaled scene.
Excerpt: Nolan never fails to deliver on the big screen experience and, in spite of some atypical predictability, this is a thrilling watch from beginning to end.
Excerpt: ‘Tenet’ sees director Christopher Nolan completely bend the knee to technical showmanship and entirely ignore the bread and butter of what makes films engaging: character. Though the mostly-practical VFX achievements make you wonder how he did this or that, there is no excuse for how actively not fun Tenet is.
Excerpt: I suspect that Nolan spent a decade-and-a-half or so on the idea for Tenet so he could have a reason to shoot action sequences in reverse. If that’s all you care about, then mission gloriously accomplished.
Excerpt: Writer (with “In the Loop” and “Veep” cowriter Simon Blackwell)/director Armando Iannucci celebrates Charles Dickens’ favorite of his own novels by shaking it up and one comes away thinking the author would have approved.
Excerpt: After taking on Russian history with The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci turns to Charles Dickens with this elaborately funny and relatively faithful adaptation
Excerpt: Where a film like Love and Friendship excels at this because it allows its characters to know they’re despicable, Iannucci wants us to believe his remain good. That incongruity threw endearment straight out the window.
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