“‘Baby Driver’ and ‘Drive’ are not road maps to modernity, they don’t offer any route through it that guarantees a safe arrival. The only advice they might offer is to tear up the map itself. To simply drive.”
“The ‘Predator’ franchise is a repository of the fears that plague the powerful. The context changes, but the fear persists — the fear that the conqueror may one day become the conquered.”
“For all its attempts at dissecting human cruelty, there’s no human core to this story, which makes its 135-minute runtime feel twice as long.”
“‘Mudbound’ plays the game and begins with a white man, but, throughout the course of an epic tale, it arrives at a moving destination.”
“Guillermo del Toro may very well be cinema’s reigning master of monster mythology.”
“Maybe the best way to counter ridiculousness is with ridiculousness.”
“It’s a miracle that Golden and McDonnell were able to create such a coherent document out of what appears to be bureaucratic chaos.”
“Roberts believes in the subtle force of his nice-as-pie protagonist, and he is right: Katie’s light outshines the blue Arizona sky.”
“For all its violence and grandiosity, it stands as an impressively filmed indictment against religious persecution.”
“Played in 2016, it’s eerily prophetic.”
“Tropes and archetypes are global, fitting into different national contexts while carrying with them the memory of their international itineraries.”
“Love can be what survives if we show up to do the work.”
“It only took three decades for ‘RoboCop’ to go from a sci-fi thought experiment to prescient documentary. What do the next few hold?”
“Portman’s vivid portrayal is the film’s greatest strength, coasting through woebegone New England accents and the script’s on-the-nose airing of themes in the final act.”
“Profoundly funny, shocking, sad and ultimately inspiring, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is the rude awakening that America needs to get its shit together.”
“We dream, we fantasize, and we are haunted by that we cannot change. We are desperate to reinvent ourselves, and we always think some other place will be better.”
