Wyatt Garfield
MOVIE REVIEW
Manodrome (2023)
If the pitch for “Manodrome” wasn't “ ‘Taxi Driver’ meets ‘Fight Club’ ” someone should be fired. What movies have better depicted a crisis of American masculinity than those two? But the key difference is that both of those movies knew what they were fighting for. “Manodrome” doesn't. It doesn’t know what it wants. It doesn't even know who to blame for the mess it’s in. Its incoherent hatred is an accurate reflection of the sickeningly violent and misogynistic ethos that is flooding social media and the minds of teenage boys all over the world. But real-world accuracy and production values worthy of the Berlinale don’t necessarily make a movie good.
Continue reading “Boys’ Club” »
Robert Viglasky/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Mothering Sunday (2021)
Based on Graham Swift’s 2016 novel, “Mothering Sunday” is another absolutely pointless reminiscence about a bygone era of wars, manners and servitude, when well-bred society people (Olivia Colman! Colin Firth!) indeed suffered real loss and tragedy – and not the elective and entirely preventable kind such as Lehman Brothers or Covid-19 – yet remained undeterred to meet for picnics and dinners just to trade barbs, throw hissy fits and be awful.
Continue reading “Emotional Laborer” »
Thatcher Keats/Neon
MOVIE REVIEW
Shirley (2020)
Where are the children? In real life, Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) had four: Laurie, Jannie, Sally and Barry. Your reviewer did not need to look up their names because, in addition to being a pre-eminent horror writer of the last century, Jackson also invented the parenting memoir. Her “Life Among the Savages” paved the way for “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” “With Six You Get Eggroll,” “Cheaper by the Dozen” and every mommy blog and family YouTube channel that has followed. And yet, in this movie writer Sarah Gubbins and director Josephine Decker have vanished them completely. What is the point?
Continue reading “The Taunting of Hill House” »