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Le Pupille
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Rohrwacher’s delightful movie is a Christmas miracle for several reasons.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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I can’t figure out what this movie was trying to do.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Avatar: The Way of Water
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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By the time Cameron finishes these things he’ll be a form of consciousness uploaded to the Cloud, married to a hologram of Mia Goth.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Tár
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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It is a testament to our time that this gray, controlled film is mostly meetings in offices and restaurants against a background of drab bureaucracy.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Banshees of Inisherin
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Keoghan, one of the strangest actors working today, jerks his performances wildly between “this guy is the greatest actor I have ever seen” and “this kid is getting a little too weird.”
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Wakanda Forever is very long and needed an intermission. You know it’s a Marvel movie because it’s steeped in boredom, with every scene threatening to not end.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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All Quiet on the Western Front
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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What has happened to the German cinema? As an anti-war war movie, this tedious, inert remake has no dramatic force.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Triangle of Sadness
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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This year a good Scandinavian director shows many things I have observed in real life but never once seen depicted on screen and he gets castigated for it.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Top Gun: Maverick
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The film is pure ideology, pure militarism, generic, and like the first Top Gun in 1986, undemanding.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) was a delightful surprise, and now Netflix has thrown tons of money at a semi-sequel, and too much money has ruined the concept.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Goldin narrates all of it in a quiet, considered, uninflected voice, a writerly style stitching together distressing tableaus as they are turned into art.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Fabelmans
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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These computer guys, Bennie explains to Sammy in The Fabelmans, “they’re gonna change the whole world.” That’s something young Steven absorbed more deeply than Ford’s instructions about where to put the horizon.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Babylon
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Babylon’s sound-recording scene replicates Singin’ in the Rain’s as something dire and unfunny and way too long.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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But it’s only an experimental film if you are rich, and the reality he criticizes is the reality of other rich people not as self-consciously artistic as he is...
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Fire of Love
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The Kraffts brought savoir faire to that most philosophical and visually impressive of science experiments, the leap into the volcano against a backdrop of molten orange.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Blonde
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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By then it is impossible to tell if the confused Dominik is attacking masculinity, Hollywood, and America, or if the film is a howl of revulsion at the existence of women.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Elvis
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Causeway
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Lila Neugebauer directs the film as if were written by Kenneth Lonergan, which is to say she does an excellent job keeping everything low-key and natural. Causeway, however, is defeated by a clunky screenplay.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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To Leslie
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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[It] forces Riseborough to imitate an ape in order to convey American dissolution, something her stunning profile works against at every moment in this film.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Living
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Ultra-maudlin, grim, and ugly, the effect is to subvert the mature humanism of Kurosawa’s sublime ending by making this into the exact kind of phony movie from which Nighy was trying to escape.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Whale
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Aronofsky’s film of this joyless play was a hit, so I guess it touched something in the moviegoing public. It had to use a bodega claw to do it because it couldn’t get off the couch, but it touched them.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Aftersun
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Charlotte Wells’s self-assured debut takes pains to be specific to its time and place.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
(2022)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The humor, though, is silly and second-rate. The googly eyes, the talking raccoon, the pet rocks at sunset, the parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey—all those work against the cast instead of with it.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Tragedy of Macbeth
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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When the best thing in a Coen film is a long sword fight, something is missing, and The Tragedy of Macbeth is a movie where we can pinpoint what it was.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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The Power of the Dog
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The film’s ambition leads to confusion. Again, the ending is murky. A lasso soaked in anthrax is something new in a western, it has to be admitted, but getting to that point was a slog, a slow crawl to the Oscars.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Tick, Tick... Boom!
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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In the hands of Miranda and Garfield, this becomes a form of desperation in which every song is forced out as a last-ditch effort.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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West Side Story
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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More importantly, every decision Spielberg has made to open the film into the city streets works magnificently in this last-gasp movie of joyous urban life, all of it perfectly executed and choreographed with great verve and beauty...
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Nightmare Alley
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a model of atmosphere and production design, with beautiful, committed performances from character actors who were given great roles...
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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The Lost Daughter
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Through flashbacks, Gyllenhaal makes the bizarre or mysterious elements of the film too clear, right up to the end.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Parallel Mothers
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Almodóvar seems more contemporary the more he becomes an outlier to the mainstream of commercial cinema.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Licorice Pizza
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The effect is that Licorice Pizza can never be central to the culture it is part of. That is its strength. It exists on the edge of Hollywood and is written in the margins of the film industry, adjacent to it, with an address in the Valley.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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King Richard
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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I don’t mind being nudged to cry as the Williams sisters’ reach for the stars in Compton. But I call “out” when I am asked to weep with joy over their first professional product endorsement.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Tammy Faye is a grotesque with a Betty-Boop-meets-Sarah-Palin voice, unhappy because she’s blinkered to reality.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Being the Ricardos
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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That Sorkin glosses the McCarthy Era like this and places himself to the right of Eastwood is surprising. But it makes sense...
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Belfast
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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2021 was a big year for b&w, and this movie falls in line with one of its current uses: telling stories for dads. Branagh’s explosion of treacle.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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Dune
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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This Dune toys with the idea of genocide, but it’s mostly a movie for people who like to memorize things. All these stupid names, one after another.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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CODA
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Presented with a group of teens singing David Bowie’s “Starman,” I would watch in silent frustration, too. The issue is that for me it would be easier to forget.
Posted Mar 28, 2022
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The Matrix Resurrections
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Everything in the middle had a contemporary TV feel, in which old IP was rebooted for a Riverdale-in-Captain-Nemo's-submarine effect that struck me as counter to the aims of the film but was also just being nice to kids.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Days
(2020)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Tsai Ming-liang's films are test cases of cinema. They require projection on large screens in dark auditoriums, even demand it, but quietly.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Lamb
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Lamb ends in very unexpected way, really out there, but it's too much too late.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Don't Look Up
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Here's a quick-and-easy lesson for the next time: if the end credits sequence is sixteen minutes long, the movie is part of the problem, not the solution.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Souvenir
(2019)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir was maybe the best film of 2019.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Whirlybird
(2020)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Close to a hundred million people watched that live. Whirlybird is an invaluable document on how it happened.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Card Counter
(2020)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The Card Counter is a subtle exorcism of national crimes eighteen years old, an unusual, serious genre film unafraid to hold its protagonist to account.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Bergman Island
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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The meta aspects of Bergman Island are bland and convoluted, requiring careful attention, which doesn't pay off. The film is more a testament to how the complacent international creative class can no longer make films like Bergman did.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Spencer
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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In this world of high-toned entertainment, you can flee from the Windsors like Diana Spencer did, and you should.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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Social Hygiene
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Filled with birdsong on the soundtrack, stitched together with fast tracking shots and whip pans, it's beautiful, too.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Scary of Sixty-First
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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An ambitious concept for anyone's first film. But it gets close enough in this second year of blighted pandemic cinema.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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France
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Shot in eye-pounding high-def, to bring out the sparkly whiteness of Léa Seydoux's dazzling, erotic teeth, France creates a unique digital anxiety in the viewer that demands full attention.
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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The Souvenir Part II
(2021)
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A.S. Hamrah
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It so easily could have been cut. Unfortunately, it encapsulates the solipsism of the whole enterprise...
Posted Jan 18, 2022
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