Turning Red (2022)

In Turning Red, a young girl named Mei (Rosalie Chiang) is doing everything right. She gets straight A’s, respects her Mom and Dad, is a good friend, and then, after a moment of adolescent crushing on an older cashier-dude, she suddenly turns into a Charmin-esque panda. The transformation a bit like Bruce Banner and the […]

Catherine Called Birdy (2022)

Plague and power-struggles aside, the Middle Ages are just as hard as the 20th century, for a young woman growing up. In Catherine Called Birdy, there’s jealousy among friends, crushes on the older boys, neighborhood parties, and parents-just-not-understanding. One big, of-its-century problem when it comes to the 1200s, however: marriage, which is more lever than […]

Nanny (2022)

For Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant living in NYC, to make the money required to bring her child Lamine to the city, she must watch someone else’s. Aisha is hired to care for Rose (Rose Decker), the daughter of a wealthy couple in Manhattan and someone who appears to be the same age as […]

Last Action Hero (1993)

Last Action Hero throws everyone into the formula of an ’80s action movie by taking its biggest fan quite literally through the screen. With a magic ticket, the young and muscle-less Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) escapes his world and enters a predictable, sunny one that he knows and can easily navigate through: the blockbuster. In […]

Fire of Love (2022)

Given the doc’s title, I expected a romance between volcanologists–perhaps one that even reflects nature’s own fires. What we get is more of a love story between volcanologist and the explosive ruptures they study. And Fire of Love is a lot of volcanoes, oozing magma, white smoke, and glowing rocks. The two French researchers Katia […]

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)

Marcel the shell (Jenny Slate) accepts as his fate that life will always be a bit difficult and the most basic tasks will take numerous tries. If at first you don’t succeed, put honey, put honey, put honey on your feet to walk up that wall and then jump from a shelf onto a spoon […]

After Yang (2022)

A memory is both precious and tragic—a treasured moment and one that’s lost. When a droid known as Yang (Justin H. Min) begins to malfunction after a very amusing family-dance competition, Jake (Colin Farrell) goes to every repair shop and does everything within his power to revive the robo-sibiling of his daughter Mika (Malea Emma […]

Avatar 2: the Way of WateR

Giving Avatar 2 an ok review feels wrong, for a movie that offers such a detailed, beautiful world—two, really: Pandora reef and Pandora forest. Because everyone on the planet here is in battle almost immediately, characters frequently just have to be warriors, which keeps them from being interesting individually. An exception is Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), a middle […]

The Northman (2022)

In The Northman, prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård)) has been trained by his father (Ethan Hawke) to embrace animalistic instincts, to fight in a vicious way that transcends his own humanness. Such fierceness comes in handy as Amleth sets out to complete his short, but very ambitious to-do list: avenge father, save mother (Nicole Kidman), kill […]

M3GAN (2023)

M3GAN, a movie about a high-tech doll with a scary-steadfast loyalty to its owner, could go a number of routes: gory bloodfest is one. PG-13 satire is another. An opening ’90s-channeling commercial for a toy called “Perpetual Pets” provides some of the film’s biggest laughs and helpfully announces the genre we’re watching. As the pebble-poopin’ […]