|
|
Dune: Part Two
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
I can only take so much messiah talk in science fiction, especially when it’s coming from Javier Bardem and Timothée Chalamet, both of whom I generally like, but here all I could think about was that they’d played Desi Arnaz and Bob Dylan.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Anora
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
In the second section... we lose the Ani we’d come to know.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
A Complete Unknown
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Chalamet’s performance is a success, a real feat of acting in which he thoroughly inhabits Dylan-ness without slipping into parody
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
A Real Pain
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
These nice boys in their nice movie made me miss Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, in their talky two-handers.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Flow
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
If animated cats, dogs, and lemurs are your thing, Flow is the movie for you. Thankfully these animals don’t talk and it isn’t a musical.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Brutalist
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The Brutalist is a deeply confused film that touches greatness by mixing disparate elements that have no business being together.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Nickel Boys
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
That Ross and Fray have managed to make it work and have created a film unlike any other proves it was a risk worth taking.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
No Other Land
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The more of this documentation, the better.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
September 5
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
In the end, September 5 is a tribute to Nielsen ratings.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The shock ending and cut to news footage of the Amini protests is a Kiarostamian move that brings the film back into the reality, but its indictment of Iranian patriarchy and repression was already clear.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
I'm Still Here
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Fernanda Torres’s performance as Eunice is one of great tribute.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Substance
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The film is too long for its one concept.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Emilia Pérez
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The film is a preposterous nightmare of first-world self-regard.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Wicked
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
John M. Chu has directed it so dutifully that no musical number can become a showstopper, which doesn’t really matter because the film’s audience already knows the songs by heart.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Sing Sing
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
In Sing Sing, the other guy is better, a more dynamic and volatile screen presence.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Conclave
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
This one is highly burnished and tightly wound, seemingly made by Fiennes and not the director.
Posted Mar 04, 2025
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Everything Else
(2016)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Willful boredom smothers Natalia Almada's Everything Else.
Posted Sep 30, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Kill, Baby... Kill!
(1966)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
It's utterly convincing, a reminder that cinema had all the tools it needed before computers.
Posted Sep 27, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Reagan
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Reagan harps on the phrase “clarity is power,” and it is clarity as a visual storytelling value more than patriotism or reason that makes this film into the most effective kind of propaganda.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Green Border
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Instead of Green Border remaining a hard-edged film in which the depredations of an unfair, destructive system are exposed, it becomes something that makes viewers feel a little bit better about the agony she brought to life in the first half...
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Becomers
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Its ensemble is excellent, especially Isabel Alamin and Molly Plunk as the first two alien-ated women.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Trap
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Trap is ingenious as a genre film, but it doesn’t go much farther than that. It comes off as more of an exercise than one of the director’s metaphysical outings.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Longlegs
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Osgood Perkins's horror film is artier than any other new movie I saw this summer.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Janet Planet
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Janet has bad taste in boyfriends, but Baker has excellent taste in character actors.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
There is so much in this film, which is open to anything. In its 163 minutes, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World encompasses both a silent color sequence comprised of 115 shots of roadside crosses and an unbroken, thirty-five-minute take...
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
La Chimera
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
La Chimera is the simpler, wiser, and newer film, with a more intimate connection to a larger, deeper past...
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Close Your Eyes
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Too much of the rest of the film is old men whining about cinema’s decline. Although I feel this sense of loss as acutely as anyone, I’m tired of this attitude in the older generation. Just go to the movies.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Linguini Incident
(1992)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The Linguini Incident is something of an East Coast version of another 1991 movie, Steve Martin’s L.A. Story, similarly a romp on the cusp of a disappearing zeitgeist, a last expression of the previous decade just after it ended.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Twisters
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Powell as Hawksian man works fine, but Edgar-Jones, a Brit playing a New Yorkified Southerner who sounds like Anne Hathaway, never quite rises to the challenge of having a personality.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Deadpool & Wolverine
(2024)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Wolverine's tiredness in the film makes sense in this repetitive regime of endlessness and its accompanying exhaustion of ideas.
Posted Sep 16, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Zone of Interest
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Glazer’s film is a punk provocation...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Io Capitano
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Paolo Carnera’s virtuosic, unhackneyed cinematography is the co-star here. Io Capitano is an exquisitely shot film, with the warm colors of Senegal competing against the shifting tones of the desert and the rust of the boat at sea.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Perfect Days
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
This is too on-the-nose, but like I said, simple. Here, Wenders gives us a kind of pleasant neorealism about a man who has withdrawn from life...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
May December
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Alarming film with a poisonous view of drama. An equally brilliant companion piece to Haynes's Safe, from 1995, May December identifies and measures the new surfaces of banality that have emerged in our lives in the intervening twenty-eight years.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Society of the Snow
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Bayona has become a worse director since he made The Impossible in 2012...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Swan
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
That's another unprecedented thing, to reveal the Brit under the cowboy...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Poison
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Because of the sets, which were built on location, the film has an abstract quality. It draws on a rich history of midcentury drama and science, moves swiftly, nothing lingered on...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Rat Catcher
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
In unprecedented total avoidance of cheese in commercial narrative filmmaking, the act of writing and the writers doing it appear in these movies, but Anderson refrains from showing their writing on the screen in superimposition.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
There was something so marvelous in seeing this actor in four roles, each of which he nailed, in these excellent films that did not get the recognition they deserved.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Rustin
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Colman Domingo's portrayal of him in George C. Wolfe's Rustin is warm and involving, and this is a somber drama about a consequential time in our nation's history...the Branford Marsalis jazz score in Rustin is as tasteful as expected, the film less so.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Oppenheimer
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Downey’s performance is one of subtlety and guile, right up to the last twist. I have never seen an actor so thoroughly redeemed by taking a hard, thankless role like this.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Maestro
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Bernstein exists parallel to her, and Cooper’s performance is daring and convincing, but something doesn’t add up.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Nyad
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Nyad follows its story closely and faithfully, never rising much above sea level. Its one hallucinatory underwater scene looks too much like it’s set at a fish-bowl castle. I couldn’t tell if that was intentional or not.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Gladstone’s performance is unlike anything else in Scorsese’s work.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Color Purple
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
It promised something that was not just hokum. But then the rest of the film was just hokum, and there was a lot of it...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Poor Things
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
It’s about time something so wicked was made at such a high level.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Teachers' Lounge
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The film is a mild version of a Haneke movie, seemingly made for the middle-schoolers who populate it and who are presumably not yet ready for a full-strength Piano Teacher's lounge.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
The Holdovers
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
Giamatti’s performance is a pleasure to watch. He is the presiding presence in the movie, and David Hemingson’s erudite screenplay allows him free range to deliver long lines of invective.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
American Fiction
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
It is hard to understand the decisions that went into Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s unique and startling novel Erasure but, with the exception of the cast, they were decisions that don’t work.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
|
|
Past Lives
(2023)
|
A.S. Hamrah
|
The film is more literature than cinema, elevated mumblecore for graduate writing seminars, the opposite of, for instance, Hong Sangsoo, who makes low-budget films about writers and filmmakers without worrying about prizes...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
Edit critic review
|
Continue with Google
>
