Michelle Orange
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
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Showing Up (2022) |
Shades of Portlandia infuse the world of Showing Up, which is not just Reichardt’s funniest film but also game in a way that rescues its players from caricature, risking silliness to propose the serious imperatives of any dedicated pursuit. - 4Columns
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| Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Aftersun (2022) |
In a mood-forward film, the prevailing sense is one of girlhood taking its last untroubled breath. Among other things this means agreeing, for a little longer, to overlook all the things about your dad he would prefer that you not see. - 4Columns
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| Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Petite Maman (2021) |
The film builds a riddle into its fable of grieving, loss, and return: If a mother and daughter could meet at the same age, how would they relate? The magic is the ease with which it depicts their convergence, its solace a feat of willing imagination. - 4Columns
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| Posted Apr 22, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World (2021) |
That Reinsve must make Julies blurriness particular is a task impeded by Triers tendency toward the broadJulies mess is strictly meta, a matter of poor existential hygieneand never less than pleasing to the eye. - 4Columns
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| Posted Feb 04, 2022
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A Tale of Springtime (1989) |
The film's aesthetic is one of private interiors, the spaces that serve as vessels for our lives, if not for time itself...Rohmer extracts from what amounts to chronic human dithering a story of transience and possibility. - 4Columns
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| Posted Apr 02, 2021
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Liar's Dice (2014) |
Both Thapa and Siddiqui glower very well, I believed every dark flicker, but the tension between their characters barely moves past its original, obvious form. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Mar 19, 2021
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Honeyland (2019) |
Merging a vérité ethos with hyperpolished execution, the intimacy of the filmmakers' access and a painterly, chiaroscuro aesthetic invite a particular type of wonder. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Dec 04, 2020
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Smooth Talk (1985) |
With its unlikely note of resolution, the coda in particular belies the adaptation's larger insistence on nuance, ambiguity, what even a young girl knows, without knowing, to be irresolvable. - 4Columns
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| Posted Nov 06, 2020
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Cabaret (1972) |
I was an instant convert to Fosse's Cabaret: it was and is nothing but the movie for me. It concentrates Fosse's interest in stories about style-its power to define and transform, to dominate and subdue. - 4Columns
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| Posted Sep 18, 2020
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Little Women (2019) |
Vital, bodied performances further the sense of characters who will exercise their will not on the hidden hills to which "independent" women are typically consigned but in the world, who will pass into womanhood not just still living but alive. - 4Columns
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| Posted Jan 13, 2020
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What Is Democracy? (2018) |
One could imagine the place of Taylor's film in the classroom, though one would first have to imagine the kind of classroom this country appears bent on destroying. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Aug 29, 2019
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Gloria Bell (2018) |
For "Gloria" fans, "Gloria Bell" is a confounding watch, a bit like that dream where your dad is your dad but also Brad Pitt. - 4Columns
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| Posted Mar 08, 2019
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The Tale (2018) |
The framing of what happened to Jenny is flexible, expansive, interested in complication; the perspective is enigmatic, deeply personal, at once singular and manifold, insular and diffuse. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Dec 07, 2018
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Voyeur (2017) |
Voyeur makes apt use of a storytelling device more commonly associated with fiction: the unreliable narrator. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Aug 28, 2018
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Risk (2016) |
Poitras lacked either the nerve or the time to make of herself a truly unreliable narrator, and so a film with the potential for two unreliable narrators falters for having none. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Aug 21, 2018
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Tully (2018) |
Despite Theron's bold, aching performance, Marlo remains an avatar of some more general experience. The richness of her ambivalence and the humanity of her predicament are just apparent enough to frustrate the vast appetite for their fuller expression. - 4Columns
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| Posted May 04, 2018
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A Wrinkle in Time (2018) |
A movie well-positioned to blow the culture's inspire-o-meter right off its mooring. - 4Columns
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| Posted Mar 27, 2018
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I Love You, Daddy (2017) |
A lazy work, quickly made, ugly to sit through, and baffling, at best, to consider. - 4Columns
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| Posted Nov 10, 2017
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Cosmopolis (2012) |
... Cronenberg's Cosmopolis expresses something new and necessary about the book, which is to say about limits, the gaps in what can be known, both within and between us. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Zero Dark Thirty (2012) |
... even good stories don't tell themselves, especially not if they aim to be great. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Take This Waltz (2011) |
Polley is a detail-oriented director who can get a little lost dazzling us with the little things. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Ruby Sparks (2012) |
It doesn't not work-there's too much genuinely great stuff going on. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011) |
The limits placed on Immordino Vreeland by a presumed family obligation and her subject's superstructure persona create a fascinating narrative tension in an otherwise admirably executed but boilerplate personality piece. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Django Unchained (2012) |
Where other movie histories might seek to teach, rewrite, or gild the stories of our collective past, Tarantino prefers to demonstrate how the movies can help us detonate history's legacies... - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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56 Up (2012) |
Here as always [Director Michael] Apted jumps between his subjects' variously aged selves with hypnotic, occasionally ruthless dexterity, mapping new narrative sequences and creating damning or salubrious conversations. - Capital New York
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Heart of a Dog (2015) |
Nonlinear and exploratory, Heart of a Dog is elusive by design. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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No Home Movie (2015) |
... the director's need for her subject carries an almost physical throb. Natalia is so richly anticipated in every patiently wrought, exquisitely framed tableau that her actual arrival within each one is almost beside the point. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Author: The JT LeRoy Story (2016) |
... the film's lack of a critical, considered perspective on the madness, some persuasive idea of [Laura] Albert and her coup, leaves the viewer feeling had. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Weiner (2016) |
... an otherwise riveting film, precisely because it engages in a form of documentary politics, wherein the identification and accounting for a subject's pathology constitutes drama, and drama's resolution. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Elle (2016) |
... Elle's success on the narrative high wire between daring psychodrama and rape-mongering is bound quite strictly to Huppert's performance as an act of repossession. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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Toni Erdmann (2016) |
Writer-director Maren Ade (Everyone Else) complicates her career woman, allowing her both cold-eyed pragmatism and very real potential for injury, blood that spurts red. - Virginia Quarterly Review
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| Posted Sep 11, 2017
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12 Years a Slave (2013) |
It is this film's unfortunate paradox that a story with so much at stake, rendered in what could only be good faith, should translate to so little. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Feb 26, 2017
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Certain Women (2016) |
Reichardt operates as usual a specific sort of advocate for her characters, applying close, sustained, and considered attention to their predicaments, and in the process evening the balance of the individual with her surroundings. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Nov 21, 2016
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Moonlight (2016) |
Jenkins has an extraordinary eye for ordinary spaces, the contexts within which his characters must define themselves. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 29, 2016
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Frantz (2016) |
Reconciliation is the metaphor at the heart of this tender, involving love story. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 22, 2016
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Lion (2016) |
Richly produced but somewhat inert. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 22, 2016
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Rats (2016) |
Rats has little of interest to say about its subject, little to provoke thought or argument, beyond which mode of death one finds more vile, or more unjustifiable as viewing material. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 22, 2016
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The Magnificent Seven (2016) |
In their few scenes together, Hawke and Washington, so vital in Fuqua's Training Day, hold the screen with sheer chemistry, and perhaps a bit of history. If only this film had known what to do with the richness of its raw material. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 22, 2016
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Queen of Katwe (2016) |
A genuine delight and a true surprise. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 22, 2016
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Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt (2015) |
With Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, Israeli filmmaker Ada Ushpiz makes an earnest, impressively researched attempt to distill her subject. - Village Voice
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| Posted Apr 07, 2016
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Zootopia (2016) |
Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident ... - Village Voice
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| Posted Mar 01, 2016
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Looking for Grace (2015) |
Thoughtful, odd and sometimes frustrating. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 24, 2015
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Where to Invade Next (2015) |
Beyond the thicket of sentiment, cherry-picking, and statistic-mongering, much of the information Moore presents is engrossing and even worthwhile. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 17, 2015
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The Danish Girl (2015) |
Redmayne's translucence of skin and of expression serves his performance well. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 17, 2015
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3 Generations (2015) |
Equal parts earnest public service announcement and screwball family drama, About Ray has more issues with identity than its titular character. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 17, 2015
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Black Mass (2015) |
The steady flow of sour deals, minor slights avenged, and prostitutes that require beating to death (poor Juno Temple) begin to wear on one's attention. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Sep 17, 2015
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Last Days in the Desert (2015) |
Garcia strips the New Testament versions of Christ's wandering to their mythic bones, and from them grows a slender fable of fathers and sons, mystery and grace. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Feb 05, 2015
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Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015) |
Going Clear delivers on its promise to make your eyes pop, and then some. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Feb 05, 2015
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Ten Thousand Saints (2015) |
Although Hawke gives a truly delightful, comic performance as Les the Mess, his active encouragement of Jude's habit is one of many elements that go unexamined, which makes the film's larger themes feel only half-conceived. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Feb 05, 2015
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Slow West (2015) |
Slow West is defined by a kind of loving ambivalence -- about its hero, its genre, and perhaps most of all about a landscape so harsh and so beautiful it almost makes a man hope to die. - sbs.com.au
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| Posted Feb 03, 2015
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