It takes a bit of time to get used to the animation of Loving Vincent, hand painted as it is in the style of van Gogh’s artworks. Overhead shots of towns and fields, and any fast […]
God’s Own Country (Lee, 2017)
A good portion of God’s Own Country rests in silence. Human silence, that is. In the background, the wind rustles and sheep bleat. Two men are forced to tend a Yorkshire farm together. One is the owner’s […]
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Robinson, 2017)
Chances are, four out of five people reading this review will never have heard of this film. “Wait, there’s another movie about Wonder Woman?!” they will exclaim. And to that I say: yes… and no. Technically […]
Strong Island (Ford, 2017)
This deeply personal film finds horror in the fact that a murder has been stripped of its horror. Yance Ford’s brother was gunned down by a white mechanic, despite the fact that he was not […]
The Cloverfield Paradox (Onah, 2018)
I’m not averse to schlock if it’s entertaining. And there are definitely moments in The Cloverfield Paradox that are fun in a schlocky sense, like Chris O’Dowd’s arm being… ripped? sliced? bitten? from his body, and then […]
Last Men in Aleppo (Fayyad, 2017)
There are so many documentaries about the crisis in Syria out there right now that you’re spoiled for choice. Last year, a Netflix short called The White Helmets won an Oscar; this year, at least three (City […]
The Ornithologist (Rodrigues, 2016)
Provocative and evocative. These two words are the best way to sum up João Pedro Rodrigues’ strange film The Ornithologist. Attempting to put a queer spin on the mythos of St. Anthony of Padua, Rodrigues charts […]
Paddington 2 (King, 2017)
We are lucky to have a film so pure, so in tune with what is right and decent, and so hugely entertaining as Paddington 2 is. I remember being similarly enchanted by the first film, despite initially […]
War for the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2017)
I am a little bummed that War for the Planet of the Apes was not a step up from Dawn, as Dawn was a step up from Rise. If memory serves, Dawn interweaved themes of loyalty, betrayal, and compassion into a genuinely crackling […]
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (James, 2016)
It is a testament to Steve James that he can turn a subject that, by all accounts, is best understood by a small subset of the population (namely, a federal savings bank being prosecuted by […]
The Boss Baby (McGrath, 2017)
There’s a clever concept here. The story has an anti-capitalist bent, revealing the exhausting impact of mass commoditization and empty corporate hierarchies. In such a culture, there is no time—nay, no room for the nuclear family, and […]
Roman J. Israel, Esq. (Gilroy, 2017)
I don’t really know if Roman J. Israel, Esq. can be summed up in a few sentences—and maybe that’s why it was largely tossed aside when it was released a few months ago. In lieu of tightly-woven […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
I do think that The Force Awakens leans a little too heavily on the mythos of the first trilogy, almost repackaging the journeyman hero elements of A New Hope and sending it out to us as though it were […]
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Big, bold and beautiful. It’s hard to describe Rian Johnson’s achievements here any other way. This is the kind of Star Wars film that lives up to the grandeur of the title: high stakes galore, with whopping […]
Don’t Breathe (Alvarez, 2016)
A most dangerous game of “blind man’s buff” plays out in Don’t Breathe, with a group of thieves trying to avoid the wrath of a blind army veteran after breaking into his home. It’s an interesting […]
The Lonely Film Critic 