Movie reviews of David McGinnis

The film is a true actor’s showcase and Boseman is on a glide path to win the first posthumous acting Oscar since Heath Ledger.

WW84 is a throwback to an earlier age when you went into every superhero movie assuming it will be dumb and mediocre, except it’s not doing it on purpose.

Soul pulls ingredients from different schools of spiritual thought that coalesce into something deeply poignant. Similarly, the animation toggles between photo-realism and the abstract with breathtaking ease, perhaps the most visually inventive effort by a studio that never stops inventing.

It’s staggering (and award-worthy) work that makes the film worth watching all on its own; factor in Ahmed’s live-wire turn and the story’s emotional punch, and Sound of Metal is undoubtedly one of the best of the year.

Wolfwalkers is a film to let envelop you, buoyed by spirited voice performances and Bruno Coulais’s sprightly, percussive score. For Moore and Cartoon Saloon, it is a showcase for masters at work.

David Fincher’s Mank is no masterpiece, but it is an artisinally crafted curio, and for a subset of cineastes there might be more value in that.

The story of the 2018 Boys State, documented here, finds those answers elusive.

It’s fun, and amusing (though rarely laugh-out-loud funny), and the long-limbed Dev Patel is incredibly charming as the titular man of many names.

It might not be the kind of film you dissect in detail and there aren’t any huge surprises, but there’s plenty of danger afoot, a cheerfully progressive message, and as I said above, Millie Bobbie Brown is a special talent.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is a joyful experience — a loving paean to a unique man who, as of this writing, is very much alive.

It’s every bit as uncomfortable and gut-bustingly funny as the original, even if Americans no longer need prodding from a weirdo in a costume to act like ignorant bigots.

It’s some the best screenwriting of this century, and he’s going to have my attention with each new project. Chicago 7 is no different, and it serves as the distillation of what he cares the most about: principled people making impassioned speeches, especially in a courtroom.

It’s safe, to a fault.

The film is not, as it were, a Good Time. But as a claustrophobic fever dream straddling the line between loneliness and madness, it’s one of the boldest artworks of the year.

Tenet lands by necessity in the bottom half of Nolan’s oeuvre. It’s loud and ambitious and the product of an arrogantly fastidious auteur who has not just been given all the money he wants to do whatever he wants, but believes himself to be, despite the facts on the ground, the savior of the theater industry.

Andrew Fried’s We Are Freestyle Love Supreme is a fascinating document.

While I Used to Go Here isn’t quite memorable for its dialogue or incidents, the feelings it engenders linger. For a bit, anyway.

It’s dumb, to be sure, and not just for parody purposes; the actual Eurovision event, judging from the YouTube rabbit hole I fell into afterwards, is beyond parody already. But the giant hamster wheels and silly accents belie a warm center.

Long after its foreshadowed, grimly poetic conclusion, First Cow haunts like a Biblical parable.

Palm Springs is genuinely clever, a bit mad, and the best comedy of the year to date.

The Vast of Night is a micro-budgeted wonder.

Da 5 Bloods is difficult and messy, as Spike Lee films often are. But it’s also urgent and powerful, vibrantly alive in its contradictions — a bold statement made as only Lee can make it.

Emma. is, awesomely, the first feature for longtime music video director Autumn de Wilde, and she brings not just impeccable visuals but playfulness and grace as well.

I don’t know if this is the show we need right now, but it has accidentally become the show of right now.