Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald Is a Muddied, Incoherent Addition to the Harry Potter Universe
The problem with Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald is that it’s trying to do way too much.
The Perverse Pessimism of Alien Covenant: The Best Alien Movie Since Aliens
Ridley Scott uses all the black goop and snarling xenomorphs to stage an earnest, ambitious attempt to grapple with big ideas.
Expanding the Potterverse in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a fun-spirited, nimble adventure when it’s not committing some of the sins of universe-expanding.
Steve Jobs (2015)
Full credit to Aaron Sorkin; with Steve Jobs he manages to solve the structural problems plaguing most biopics, which struggle to accommodate the scope of a human life in a neat three act narrative. How? By literally structuring the film as three acts – three product launches – across which we come to know our…
Double Feature: Listen Up Philip (2014) and Queen of Earth (2015)
So it turns out I’m not much of an Alex Ross Perry fan. I watched Listen Up Philip, Perry’s third feature, with high expectations. I’d heard positive things about this intelligent indie film, and its cast – Elisabeth Moss, Krysten Ritter, Jonathan Pryce and Jason Schwartzman as the titular Philip, a self-obsessed semi-successful New York…
Inherent Vice (2014)
Inherent Vice is one of those rare examples of cinema where the experience of the audience is entirely aligned with the experience of the film’s protagonist. This achievement should celebrated when found in great horror films, that terrify and alienate you along with their characters, or classics like Goodfellas, which follows sharp-edged cocaine dynamism with…
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