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Melissa Anderson

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Feel-Good Rapper Comedy Patti Cake$ Doesn’t Earn Its Mic

By Melissa Anderson
Aug 24, 2017

The story beats of Patti Cake$, a socioeconomic-sermonizing comedy about a thick young white woman with huge hip-hop dreams and little prospects, are as predictable as the ticking of an egg timer, as generic and tinny as the pulses of a drum machine. I rooted not for Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle...
Atomic Blonde: At Least the Fights Are Good

By Melissa Anderson
Jul 26, 2017

Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German...
Sisterhood is Powerful — and Pugnacious — in Girls Trip

By Melissa Anderson
Jul 19, 2017

Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with...
David Lowery’s A Ghost Story Gets Lost in Time and Space

By Melissa Anderson
Jul 18, 2017

“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the...
Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled Skims the Civil War Past

By Melissa Anderson
Jun 27, 2017

Ever since her feature debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), a dreamy, diaphanous tale about the mysteries of girlhood, Sofia Coppola has ranked among the finest distillers of mood (especially languor) and milieu. Those qualities abound in The Beguiled, her sixth film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War–set novel of...
Salma Hayek Commandeers Beatriz at Dinner's Nimble Class Comedy

By Melissa Anderson
Jun 13, 2017

A film often smartly attuned to language, Beatriz at Dinner — a sober comedy about class clash and soft-to-hard racism directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White — operates in several different idioms. English and Spanish (sometimes unsubtitled) are spoken, as are the lexicons of healing and affluence...
Wonder Woman Emerges to Save the World But Risks Losing Herself

By Melissa Anderson
May 29, 2017

Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is enduring for the past 75 years as a wildly unstable signifier. Director Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, further adds to this complicated, contradictory cluster of signs and symbols. Forged from deeply feminist sympathies, the character debuted in All...
Laura’s Theme: Tracing the Distraught DNA of Twin Peaks’ Dead Heroine

By Melissa Anderson
May 22, 2017

The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which he has avowed is his final film, is a four-word fragment: “a woman in trouble.” However simple, the phrase hypnotically evokes the sinister, insoluble mysteries that have been at the core of many of his ten features and especially in Twin...
Azazel Jacobs’s The Lovers Plumbs the Mysteries of Matrimony

By Melissa Anderson
May 19, 2017

A comedy, and also a tragedy, of remarriage — without couples counseling or divorce — writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers revitalizes its genre with a piquant premise: What happens when long-wedded spouses, each with a romantic partner outside their dormant dyad, find the spark reignited — a combustion that results...
Cynthia Nixon Reaches for the Truth of Emily Dickinson's Mysterious Life

By Melissa Anderson
May 17, 2017

Both the poet's body and soul are made ineradicable in Davies' lovely film.
Snatched Is a Perfect Movie for Your Mother if Mom Hates and Fears Other Countries

By Melissa Anderson
May 11, 2017

“I am garbage,” Amy Schumer’s Emily Middleton, on a vacation in Ecuador with her ma, Linda (Goldie Hawn), that’s gone all wrong, chimes in agreement with someone who’s leveled the insult at her — and who’s also holding the two women for ransom — in Snatched. Your enjoyment of this...
Ben Wheatley’s Shootout Drama Free Fire Finds Nothing New in Its Violence

By Melissa Anderson
Apr 19, 2017

Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing...
Ozon's Frantz Treats Raw Grief With Polite Restraint

By Melissa Anderson
Apr 14, 2017

Set immediately after World War I, Frantz, the latest by the prolific François Ozon, is structured by, and titled after , an absence: a young German soldier killed in battle. Other deficiencies, not intended, soon become apparent in this Lost Generation tale of love, grief and lies, which Ozon liberally...
Colossal Has a Big Idea, but It Quickly Shrinks

By Melissa Anderson
Apr 12, 2017

Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two...
U Mad Bro? Wilson Rages Against Nothing of Note

By Melissa Anderson
Mar 23, 2017

The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and...
In a Bizarre Ghost Story, Kristen Stewart Haunts Herself

By Melissa Anderson
Mar 23, 2017

In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to...
They Can't Even Make the Sex Hot: On Fifty Shades Darker

By Melissa Anderson
Feb 10, 2017

Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the...
Toni Erdmann Toasts the Hilarity of Everyday Humiliation

By Melissa Anderson
Jan 24, 2017

Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer/director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates on many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a...
Pablo Larraín’s Neruda Fractures the Biopic

By Melissa Anderson
Jan 17, 2017

“Art is a lie that tells a truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. The aphorism animates Pablo Larraín’s canny and vigorous Neruda, a sidelong biopic of the preeminent Chilean poet and politician, featuring a brilliant Luis Gnecco in the title role, that’s equal parts fact and fiction. (Conversely, Larraín’s film also...
Woman Power Serves a Boy in Mike Mills' Late-'70s Remembrance

By Melissa Anderson
Jan 11, 2017

One of the quasi-bohemians in Mike Mills’ gauzy 20th Century Women loves to document ephemera, taking photos of everything she owns. A similar instinct — archiving as art — guides Mills’ movie itself, a trip back in time in which era-specific talismans substitute for genuine thought. Though big feels glut...
Melissa Anderson’s Top Films of 2016

By Melissa Anderson
Dec 27, 2016

In a profile early this year, the novelist Dana Spiotta told the New York Times, “That’s seductive, being paid attention to.” Several of the films below — those that seduced me — feature pivotal scenes, whether in diners, at picnic tables or at kitchen tables, of one character raptly listening...
The Sensuous Moonlight Dares to Let Black Men Love

By Melissa Anderson
Nov 8, 2016

A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins’ wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: “Who is you, man?” The beauty of Jenkins’ second feature, which follows his San Francisco–set black-boho romance Medicine for Melancholy (2008), radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics...