Emma Watson has two films in theatres right now—one has just become one of the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, the inessential but good Beauty and the Beast remake, and this thing. The Circle, on paper, has great ingredients: Watson, Tom Hanks, Patton Oswalt, cool director (James Ponsoldt of The Spectacular Now and […]
movie review
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Maudie: wrongly located, but beautifully shot
Maudie, a very Nova Scotia story, was very clearly shot in Newfoundland. Only Nova Scotians will care about this. (The production moved when the film tax credit was mangled.) Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins, excellent) lived an awful life made even worse by a terrible man (Ethan Hawke, of course), as Maudie depicts while also curiously […]
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Perfume War is inspiring and well-told
Michael Melski’s rousing documentary follows the journey of Haligonians Trevor Greene and Barb Stegemann, lifelong best friends. Greene is a soldier wounded by an axe attack in Afghanistan. Stegemann is the founder of The 7 Virtues, a fragrance company that buys its oils from farmers there, freeing them from forcibly growing poppies that eventually become heroin. […]
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Kristen Stewart waits for a ghost in Personal Shopper
So much has been written of Kristen Stewart since her Twilight era began in 2008: She slumps! She’s sullen! She looks like she hates the red carpet! Fuck her, Edward is mine! Even though she starred alongside a similarly dour, similarly slumpy man clearly just as unhappily stuck in a Hollywood-engineered romance. Even though she […]
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Call of the Forest: an earnest and sobering documentary
Sort of a cheerful doomsday warning, the Canadian documentary Call of the Forest offers a look at the history of trees across the world, and what man taking them away has done to the earth over time. Using the amiable Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger as a guide, Jeff McKay’s film travels to Japan, California, Ireland […]
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The live-action Beauty and the Beast is surprisingly good
While essentially pointless, the surprisingly good live-action Beauty and the Beast is more than an exercise in cash grabbery. Emma Watson is an excellent Belle, and though the men are played by guys named “Dan Stevens” and “Luke Evans” (the male movie star is truly a non-event these days), they too comport themselves well, facially […]
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Kong: Skull Island is unintentionally funny
Kong: Skull Island is so actively bad that there’s no way it could’ve ever been good, even though there are some (deliberately) excellent one-liners scattered throughout. It’s so bad that the bullshit “shouldn’t art-house actors get to make some money once in awhile” excuse does not hold—and when we talk about that we’re talking high […]
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Logan has almost no female characters
Out of the hundreds of credited cast in Logan, three women have names. There is Laura (Dafne Keen), the mute young girl slash mutant who decapitates men with no feeling or expression. There is Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who is murdered. There is Kathryn (Elise Neal), who is murdered. There is a solider who says “Here […]
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Review: The Salesman
The official summary of The Salesman is “the story of a couple whose relationship begins to turn sour during their performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.” It’s not untrue, but also way off—when Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is attacked in their new apartment, her husband Emad (Shahab Hosseini) quietly plots his revenge on her […]
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Below Her Mouth: sexy, but lacks story
When Below Her Mouth made the festival rounds last fall, much was made of its all-female crew and sex scenes shot from the female gaze. When engaged-to-a-man Jasmine (Natalie Krill) meets Dallas (Erika Linder) at a bar, she’s interested but hesitant. Dallas, who also happens to be working on the house next door to Jasmine’s, […]
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The Founder: not quite a drama
Michael Keaton’s first attempt to really capitalize on his Birdman comeback—he had a minor role in Spotlight—is valiant, but doesn’t add up to much. He’s Ray Kroc, who stole McDonald’s from the actual McDonalds, a pair of corn-fed brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) with virtue and principles, things Kroc abandons almost immediately. We […]
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The Edge of Seventeen isn’t a “teen film”
“So with the slow graceful flow of age/I went forth with an age-old desire to please/on the edge of 17,” sings Stevie Nicks in her 1982 classic. The hero of the new comedy The Edge of Seventeen, Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), also has a desire to please, though in a refreshing twist it’s mostly for her […]