2015 Reviews

★★ 2/4 I’m surprised in the trouble I’ve had separating Kyle Alvarez’s film about Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 college student pseudo-prison experiment from the questionable [...]

★★ 2/4 Edith Cushing lays it bare early on in Crimson Peak: “It’s not a ghost story—it’s more a story with ghosts in it. The ghosts are a metaphor for the past.” Does that mean all [...]

★★★ 3/4 Perhaps the most outré of this year’s crop of outrage cinema, Adam McKay’s The Big Short turns economic catastrophe into bitter farce, at times hilarious in its excesses, at others [...]

★★★½ 3.5/4 In another life Cary Fukunaga could’ve been a nature documentarian. He possesses an innate ability to turn the natural world into an intrinsic part of the story he’s [...]

★★½ 2.5/4 Although sports movies generally offer one of two endings for the protagonist—win or lose—the true outcome is seldom so binary. Face it; in Hollywood, even the losers win. Moral [...]

★½ 1.5/4 Pretty much the soulless, uninventive update I was dreading, The Peanuts Movie replaces the tentative melancholy of Charles Schulz’s work with a relentlessly upbeat, [...]

★½ 1.5/4 Fifty years of James Bond movies have created multiple constants within the series. Exotic locales. Expensive cars. Hammy villains. Rampant sexism. BOOZE! But narrative continuity? Not so [...]

★★★ 3/4 Turns out the best thing for latter-day Ridley Scott’s career is to go simple. After a series of films with escalating plot loopiness—from the chowderheaded (Prometheus) to the [...]

★★½ 2.5/4 99 Homes, Ramin Bahrani’s uneven torrent of rage and hopelessness set amidst the 2010 housing crisis in Orlando, may singlehandedly create the scariest new genre of the 21st [...]

★★★ 3/4 The new Netflix Pablo Escobar drama Narcos opens with the following title card: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by [...]