Blockers (2018) Puerile. I’m guessing the deal here is that Leslie Mann gets to have a movie career as she is married to Judd Apatow, or something.
Overboard (2018) Gratuitous insult to the 1987 Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell original that needlessly swaps around roles and subtracts all the fun.
A Quiet Place (2018) Tautly directed and convincingly acted but laughably implausible suspense-horror.
Early Man (2018) Brilliantly animated, but never more than faintly amusing.
Ready Player One (2018) The opening few minutes — including Van Halen’s “Jump” and dialogue like this: “I was born in 2027 ….after the bandwidth riots” — set the scene for what promises to be typically Spielbergian garbage. Sadly, it lives up to that promise.
Lady Bird (2017) Long on characterization and sense of place, this blackly comic, understated and well-played drama more closely resembles a 1970s movie than anything Hollywood has offered for over three decades. It took me a while even to recognize Laurie Metcalfe — the last “new” movie I saw her in may have been Mike Figgis’s excellent Timecode (2000) — and Saoirse Ronan seems to be if anything over-exposed at the moment, but still a superior quality, intimate independent film.
Exhibition on Screen: Canaletto & the Art of Venice (2017) Astonishingly dull… raking over every conceivable detail of an artist’s output that basically didn’t vary over the entire course of his career… even worse than The English Patient. I was the only member of the audience under seventy, and that was in Cannes.
Phantom Thread (2017) Flawlessly put together and acted — but the attraction between Vicky Krieps and an Asperger-ish, somewhat foppish Daniel Day Lewis is fundamentally implausible.
I, Tonya (2017) Archly entertaining and funny, with great ensemble performances, in which Allison Janney steals every one of her scenes.
FATAL VISIONS 