Female Film Critics 24/375
Adapted by Colby Day from Jaroslav Kalfar’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia, Spaceman is unevenly directed by Sweden’s Johan Renck, who never quite decides whether this is a melancholy marital relationship drama, an existential meditation on loneliness, or cosmic conjecture about the ability of a human to remaining sane while in claustrophobic solitude. Spaceman is ambiguous and inconsequential.
Read more
The year is 2020. Confined to the insides of their homes and glued to the internet for lack of anything better to do during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one YouTube live streamer and an army of Reddit investors pushed hedge fund billionaires to the brink in the infamous GameStop Wall Street scandal. Less than three years after the real-life event, director Craig Gillespie and writers Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo bring Dumb Money, the true story of the scandal that pitted average armchair investors – so-called “dumb money” — against hedge fund managers through a grassroots investing movement.
Read more
The creative life is a circus for an artist, with allures impossible to resist. Director Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical drama The Fabelmans shows his early fascination with movies; yet instead of making himself the focus—a portrait of the blockbuster pioneer as a young Steven, if you will—he crafts an intimate story that credits his parents as his inspiration.
Read more
The Fabelmans presents director Steven Spielberg’s family story. Spielberg, who needs no introduction, has co-written, produced, and directed his most personal movie to date, the autobiographical The Fabelmans. Beginning January 10, 1952, in New Jersey, progressing through 1964 high school graduation, and concluding a year thereafter, the story profiles this family, anchored in Sammy, i.e., Steven. Beginning with his first film, Sammy is captivated.
Read more
Matt Reeves’ The Batman is a brooding, noir’ish interpretation of the DC Comics superhero, focusing for almost three hours on a sorrowful, conflicted Dark Knight, haunted by serious psychological issues involving his late father. Working with cinematographer Greig Fraser and production designer James Chinlund, director/writer Matt Reeves bathes the film in a bleak, inky blackness, enhanced by Michael Giacchino’s symphonic score.
Read more
The Batman is set 20 years after the murder of young Bruce Wayne’s parents. It’s Halloween and Gotham’s “on the take” political leaders are being killed by the sadistic Riddler…forcing Batman to scrutinize the city’s corruption and the Wayne family’s possible involvement. The Batman is a throwback private eye film and a psychological thriller. It’s more True Detective and less Super Hero.
Read more
Ultimately, this show about brief, ambiguous escapes is reminiscent of the fatalism of the early 20th century American naturalist novels in which the plight of trapped characters becomes a microcosm of the American macrocosm, a culture depicted gloomily as the habitation of beings with no real place either in nature or culture, no core identity, no coherence outside of the deadening rules and conventions society has invented. This is a vision that is too bleak for my taste, but I respect it because it goes well beyond being the same old familiar jailbreak story. It has a perspective.
Read more
A first-time screenwriter, Dano, known for his performances in “There Will Be Blood,” “Love & Mercy” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” adapted “Wildlife” alongside his actress/screenwriter partner Zoe Kazan (“The Big Sick,” “Ruby Sparks”) from Richard Ford’s 1990 novel about thoughtful teenager Joe Brinson, who watches his parents’ marriage unravel shortly after the family’s move in 1960 to small-town Montana.
Read more
Jake Gyllenhaal and Ed Oxenbould deliver fine performances, but Wildlife is the Carey Mulligan show. Her old friend Paul Dano has given her a present, which she graciously gifts him back with one of the towering performances of her career.
Read moreInventive director Bong Joon Ho (“Snowpiercer,” “The Host”) has concocted a satirical action-comedy, blended with a controversial, socially-conscious allegorical fable. The prologue introduces Lucy Mirando (Tilda Switon), the ethically-challenged CEO of a powerful, multi-national, agrochemical corporation. She announces that her company will breed a new pig-like creature, a gigantic mammal, to solve the world’s hunger problem, distributing 26 genetically modified super-piglets to locations around the world to be raised by local farmers within their own “eco-friendly” culture.
Read more