Review by Courtney Anderson
Everything about If Beale Street Could Talk shows that Barry Jenkins’ ultimate goal is to show how much he loves these characters and the Black people who inspired them. And he picked the perfect story to show that love.
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Review by Rilwan Balogun
At the close of this movie, you don’t leave warm and fuzzy because they got him out of jail. But you sit with feeling uncomfortable and sad. This is the point.
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Matt Dillon stars in director Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built
Review by Logan Kenny
Is The House That Jack Built the cinematic form of the manipulation that follows abuse? A work with the pretense of self-examination that is actually just another reminder of the pain that many women have went through? Or is it a genuine apology, a work of intense self loathing, an abuser longing with existential suffering and a desire for death because he can’t achieve the catharsis in this life anymore?
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Review by Zach Dennis
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse shows not only the endless visual prospects of the comic-book genre, but also the natural inclusion of diversity and representation that felt less like a business plot and more of a reminder that the hero’s identity is fluid because anyone can be behind the mask.
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Hailee Steinfeld stars in director Travis Knight’s Bumblebee
Review by Andrew Swafford
Knight seems to be bringing Laika’s humanistic sensibility to a franchise heretofore so concerned with militaristic hardware and mechanics.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
To me, watching Widows felt like I was watching the outline of a potentially fantastic script.
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Princess Vanellope meets the full Disney princess canon in a scene from Ralph Breaks the Internet
Review by Michael O’Malley
For Disney, self-critique is only useful for the extent to which it makes Disney look good. And a sequel is only as good as the value it adds to the company stock.
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Review by Zach Dennis
Creed was so aspiring not only because of the impeccable directing by Ryan Coogler (who returns to this movie in a producing role only) but by Coogler’s incredible focus on the nuances of modern masculinity. The frustrating part of this second Creed is that it picks up this beat again, but lacks the subversion that its predecessor possessed.
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Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali star in director Peter Farrelly’s Green Book
Review by Courtney Anderson
Green Book uses vital pieces of Black history as plot devices to tell the story of a loud-mouthed racist who learns to be less racist because of that time he became friends with a cool Black guy.
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Tim Blake Nelson stars in the Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Review by Lydia Creech
The Coens are obviously fascinated with the genre, and they’ve gotten the chance to do feature-length treatments several times in the past. Here in the short format, they get a chance to really flex their storytelling skills to quickly get the audience invested and then wrongfoot them.
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Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant star in director Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Review by Reid Ramsey
“Caustic wit. That’s my religion,” sighs Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) during an early conversation in the new movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?. This one line sums up, perhaps too simplistically, the overall attitude of the movie.
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Review from Festival du Nouveau Cinéma at Montreal by Clément Hosseart
Season one lured some of his viewers with a pastiche of procedurals, where the detective and his partner are your average local cops. Like Broadchurch, but with less of a Scottish accent, and with more cows. Season two mixes things up with some of the most literally down to earth science-fiction you will find.
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Review by Clément Hossaert
Built on the foundations of the book written by Shirley Jackson, this new edifice gives each of its characters a wing, a corridor and a past to live on, and a burden of trauma to deal with.
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Nicholas Cage stars in director Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy
Review by Lydia Creech
I’m sure Mandy will find its niche and hit the cult status it’s aiming for (it’s well on its way), but I’m fine with being left behind.
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Shannon Purser and Noah Centineo star in director Ian Samuels’s Sierra Burgess is a Loser
Review / Personal Essay by Courtney Anderson
I’m always waiting for the movie where there’s a fat girl that actually does have a love interest, or at least isn’t spending the entire movie commiserating her weight. Which is what I thought Sierra Burgess Is A Loser would be. And it wasn’t. At all.
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Review by Jordan Collier
Something this mercurial and wonderful begs to be seen rather than described. It defies traditional categorization. It is an experience packed with so much color, heart, originality, and unbridled positivity that it makes impossible to stop smiling. Night is Short is a whirlwind of epic proportions, and it is one worth getting swept up in.
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Haley Lu Richardson and Regina Hall star in director Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls
Review by Nadine Smith
Support the Girls spoke truth to me personally as a child of strip malls and subdivisions, but it speaks to a much larger truth in its depiction of how the working class exists today.
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Mark Wahlberg in Mile 22
Review by Reid Ramsey
Mile 22 is just a bad story filled with bad characters and knowing that fictional characters were purposefully written and directed this way makes it all the worse.
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Topher Grace stars as David Duke in BlacKkKlansman, the latest Spike Lee joint
Review by Andrew Swafford and Lydia Creech
In this (“fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t!”) story of Ron Stallworth, Lee does a hilarious job poking fun at the kind of people that join the Klan, but, importantly, he also shows how insidious and pervasive racist ideologies can be.
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15-year-old actress Elsie Fisher plays Kayla in director Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade
Review by Andrew Swafford
As a teacher, I’ve had countless conversations with colleagues fretting about how much tougher adolescence must be in the age of social media, and I’ve always found myself nodding in agreement. However, Eighth Grade reframes the conversation, asking us to empathetically consider why kids love being plugged in.
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