I was mostly ambivalent about The Mission, the 2023 documentary chronicling the attempts of John Chau to evangelize the occupants of North Sentinel Island despite access to the island being… Continue reading "Last Days (Lin, 2025)"
It is hard for me to evaluate Divia, since the element I value most in films, narrative, is at best implied and at worst totally absent. The film’s notes describe… Continue reading "Divia (Hreshko, 2025)"
Blue Moon is a film so dour, so bitter, so devoid of joy or hope or spirit, that even those who praise it have trouble articulating why they are doing… Continue reading "Blue Moon (Linklater, 2025)"
The body-swapping conceit of Good Fortune is tired and overused, but the film’s execution of it is so good that it manages to transcend the constraints of recycling a familiar… Continue reading "Good Fortune (Ansari, 2025)"
Warning–this review mentions plot points that may be considered spoilers. I wrote in a review of One Big Happy Family that films about groups or cultures to which one does… Continue reading "300 Letters (Santa Ana, 2025)"
Roofman is either a morally confused movie or a morally confusing one. The film opens with Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) robbing a McDonald’s with some kind of shotgun, marching the… Continue reading "Roofman (Cianfrance, 2025)"
Comedy about specific ethnic or religious groups can be one of the hardest genre subsets to evaluate because the line between Horatian self-deprecation and Juvenalian contempt can move–or appear to–depending… Continue reading "One Big Happy Family (Sohn, 2025)"
Nuremberg is a sprawling mess of a movie, one that I admittedly appreciated all the more for its messiness. Topics like the Final Solution don’t lend themselves to commercial slickness,… Continue reading "Nuremberg (Vanderbilt, 2025)"
The War Between works slightly better as an illustrated history lesson than as a feature film. Westerns have been a staple of American film since its inception, partially because of… Continue reading "The War Between (Correa, 2025)"
Naked Ambition is an affable documentary that is brimming with interesting tidbits and vignettes about the life and work of model turned photographer Bunny Yeager. What keeps it in the… Continue reading "Naked Ambition (Scholl and Tabsch, 2023"
