| | American Fiction (2023) | All this makes American Fiction a worthy answer to Erasure: a film that shows the “African-American experience” as far richer than it’s often allowed to be, worthy of representation as deep and capacious as that allowed to others. - New Statesman |
| | Mean Girls (2024) | Mean Girls is a strange beast: with a nearly identical screenplay written by Tina Fey (who also resumes her role as the high-school teacher Ms Norbury), it’s brought down mainly by mediocre musical numbers. - New Statesman |
| | Cat Person (2023) | Cat Person is horrible material for a film, as Roupenian herself has joked. It’s a claustrophobically psychological story about being stuck in your own head, in which almost nothing happens. Fogel fails to dramatise this. - New Statesman |
| | BlackBerry (2023) | The characters are thinly sketched stereotypes (with the exception of Howerton, who it is hard not to like in any role). This is the kind of movie you would watch on a plane without complaint, then utterly forget. - New Statesman |
| | Past Lives (2023) | Past Lives is naggingly unsatisfying: the characters are not fully realised, and nor is their story. The film anticipates an impact it doesn’t earn. - New Statesman |
| | Scrapper (2023) | There are few surprises in Scrapper, except its sickly sweetness: the girl is pushy but sweet, the friend is messy but sweet, the father is tough but sweet. Everyone is sweet: so is its twee style. - New Statesman |
| | Barbie (2023) | For all that Mattel will profit from Gerwig’s name, there’s little here of her private reserve of outstanding sensitivity, messiness and appreciation for the beauty of... “the real world”. In their place are merely hollow overtures to feminism. - New Statesman |
| | Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) | With a thin plot filled out by half-hour chase sequences, the film is 163 minutes long: even at the press screening, people were checking their phones. - New Statesman |
| | Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023) | Last Dance feels like little more than a cynical feature-length advertisement for the real-world stage show. - New Statesman |
| | She Said (2022) | For all She Said employs crescendo strings, it is not a thriller: there is not one moment of tension or fear. What are the “stakes”, you ask? The leads worry Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article will come out first. With respect: are you kidding me? - New Statesman |
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vTrZynrJ%2BirrW7xKxlnKedZLCztdOimqxnkaO7brnAp6avZ52kw6qx0g%3D%3D