April Wolfe’s Top 10 Films of 2017
Some of them gave me hope for America, others invited me into foreign-to-me cultures and one even made me delightfully nauseous
Some of them gave me hope for America, others invited me into foreign-to-me cultures and one even made me delightfully nauseous
The first few months of the year are notorious for being a period of drought at the movies, but the January–March 2018 release calendar offers a surprising deluge of highly anticipated films
Over the course of the film, we go from seeing the elder Getty as a figure of great power to one of no power at all, and that is perhaps the most fascinating part of the movie …
Guadagnino adeptly captures not just physicality of a burning love but also the emotional and intellectual components, and the film is all the more salient for that careful, realistic interpretation
Hugh Jackman is charming as ever, and two dance scenes are mildly inventive and well-executed, yet Jackman’s goodwill and a splash of inspired choreography are not enough to earn the “greatest” in the title
The new one is bigger and dumber than the previous, a feat considering the relentless clatter of the 1995 iteration …
The Pitch Perfect films have offered an increasingly unpalatable blend of pop-song empowerment, rah-rah women’s friendship and broad gross-out comedy
The Post tells the story of the late Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), the longtime publisher of The Washington Post, who took over its operations after her husband committed suicide in the 1970s
Chastain seems at times to be both the lead and her own supporting actor in this story, as she oscillates between traditionally feminine and masculine modes of behavior
Those expecting camp or catfights won’t find them in Gillespie’s movie, which instead offers thoughtful and somewhat objective critiques …
Any thinking person watching Downsizing is 10 steps ahead of Damon’s blinkered schlub, and watching him piece together the bare facts about how this future America works — and how our America works today — makes for a frustrating sit
Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie buff who celebrated blood, breasts and beasts with his Dallas newspaper column, is planning a trip back to the town that made him the sage of the drive-in movie theater. The outlaw drive-in movie critic from Grapevine with a massive collection of bolo ties will…
Cinestate’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 premiered in an interesting setting for a gritty, grindhouse-style action flick starring Vince Vaughn. The arthouse moviegoing crowds of the Venice Film Festival became the first public audience to see director S. Craig Zahler’s prison action thriller. “We premiered it at the Venice Film Festival,…
Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve and visual charm
Morris’ film dramatizes Olson’s last days between interviews with Olson’s son Eric and journalists and lawyers who have taken the case as a cause
My Friend Dahmer, from a graphic memoir of the same name by the pseudonymous Derf Backderf, is a kind of coming-of-age tale that dissects a troubled kid’s descent into murder. Backderf was a high-school pal of the boy who would grow up to become the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey…
Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes
As Ginny and her life unravel, Allen’s sympathy for her seems to dry up, and she becomes something like the villain of the piece
… Just as the story should start to speed up and get more predictably exciting, it becomes weirder, drawn to odd tangents
Franco portrays Wiseau as a haughty but charismatic weirdo, someone who isn’t well-liked but who definitely gets noticed
And one of the great delights of this film is the way it charts the shifting waves of allegiances that can occur in a family that loves and argues with equal ferocity
An article, a book and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’ voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism