Movie reviews of David McGinnis

A better comparison would be First Cow: It’s a fully-formed, beautifully lensed allegory about grief and loss. It’s deliberately paced, but a strikingly efficient 92 minutes. It presents the underbelly of a world we kinda know — Portland fine dining — but with enough heightened originality to keep us on our toes.

Like in Guardians, Gunn has a lot of fun with the idea of independent chaos agents discovering their consciences when forced to work together in common cause, and it all builds to a climax that is as emotionally satisfying as it is visually thrilling.

The Green Knight is The Seventh Seal with a talking fox; The Last Temptation of Christ with Treebeard, and will be hard to beat for my favorite film of the year.

As a time capsule, Summer of Soul is exceptional; as an experience, it could have been twice as long (or a miniseries) and there would still be more music to hear and stories to tell. A gift that will never be forgotten again.

Mostly, No Sudden Move is another patented Soderbergh exercise in genre style. Solomon’s plotting is labyrinthine, meant to leave you floundering — the better to enjoy rewatching later.

It’s just a solid, well-staged, well-acted thrill ride that happens to finally give one of the original “Big 6” Avengers her due.

While the series isn’t anything revolutionary, it is engaging, well-acted, and beautifully lensed by primary cinematographer Dave Garbett.

Luca lands somewhere around the middle of the hallowed Pixar rankings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a “lesser” film. Slight, sure, but are you going to complain about a shorter run time and a story that isn’t over-plotted? Of course not.

The cast is appealing (Ramos, especially, has a casual charisma that should make him a star), the songs are dynamically orchestrated and performed, and Jon M. Chu’s direction is Big and Widescreen...

It’s a challenge to square that with Cumberbatch’s innate gravitas, but the actor delivers, especially in the wrenching final reels.

Mitchells is incredibly smart about its storytelling. Throwaway gags from the first act get revisited for maximum pathos in the third, and the conflicts between family members are totally convincing.

You can literally feel the weight of it: the strength, dignity, and millions of stories left untold over centuries of terror.

Hopkins pulls it off as only he can, with Colman’s nuanced performance matching him scene for scene.

As spectacle, Godzilla vs. Kong is wildly, mindlessly entertaining. As “cinema,” it’s… well, you know what? It is cinema. “So massive, so stupid,” but cinema. So there.

As a directorial debut for Fennell , it’s remarkable. For Mulligan, it’s the performance of a lifetime.

Collective’s ending may be downbeat realpolitik, but the story it’s telling is a vital and universal cautionary tale. It’s the best documentary of 2020.

Most of Minari’s story unfolds like that, a series of moments that slowly fill in the mosaic, ultimately revealing through triumph and heartbreak that it’s not merely what we do that matters, but what we do together. It’s a special film. See it.

When Raya goes for the jugular thematically, it connects — a great third act makes up for a lot of shortcomings, but the road there is too unsteady to put it in the studio’s top tier.

Moira Buffini’s script is nevertheless engaging enough, despite its many historical liberties.

For Nomadland, that means Zhao and her team — including an as-good-as ever McDormand, meaning she is extremely good — traveled the country in vans for months, looking for the right faces and personalities to help tell the story. The result is something wholly original, empathetic, and beautiful in its own way.

Kaluuya has demonstrated his range and intensity in Get Out and Widows, but this ought to launch him into the stratosphere — and onto the Oscar stage, if there is any justice.

His second collaboration with Hanks also yields another exceptional performance, showing a soulful vulnerability that not even Spielberg regularly asks of the actor. Yet, for all of its well-made parts, News of the World is only a solid outing, not a transcendent one.

The performances are so dynamic and the dialogue is so rich that it never feels artificial or constrained — a remarkable accomplishment for director Regina King.

Vinterberg’s script is full of deeply human moments, and the cast is uniformly outstanding.