Author: Dan Stalcup

To Leslie (2022)

To Leslie mercifully starts us at rock-bottom, meaning this addiction-recovery drama is almost all upwards-oriented, even with the occasional backslide. Given its dour topic of a lottery winner’s life completely broken down, it’s almost charming and cheery.

Andrea Riseborough really is that good: she’s funny and humane and sad in perfect balance. It’s not on the level of Blanchett or Yeoh (or the criminally un-nominated Mia Goth in Pearl) where we’ll still be talking about it a decade from now, but the Academy has nominated less worthy performances, even this year. (See: Judd Hirsch’s 90 seconds on screen.)

Marc Maron is pretty great, too.

Capsule

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022)

Post author By Dan Stalcup
Post date 01/29/2023
No Comments on The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022)

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse opens with a mole mistaking a tree for a cake and never gets any less whimsical than that. It ends with an inverse Jungle Book finale, and the entire script is basically The Little Prince platitudes. Serious eye-roll piece of fluff. This is just desperate to be a movie that gets sentimentally adopted as a holiday classic, but it’s far too saccharine and shallow to earn it.

The picture-book-come-to-life animation is genuinely quite lovely, though, with outstanding use of white space snow sliced by daring shadows, plus beautiful inky skies. The motion is occasionally a bit ungainly — it works better as stills — but my big complaint is the character designs which have these weird sketch-like flourishes that simulate un-erased pencil lines. It’s most distracting on the horse (you can see it in the poster) but there for all of them.

Maybe in the right context — cozied up with your kids on a snow day next to a crackling fire — it might spark magic, but it’s just a bit too much knock-off Winnie the Pooh for me.

Review

Grand Piano (2013)

I’ve noted multiple times throughout this retrospective that Damien Chazelle likes to trace the challenges of musicians and creatives in his movies, requiring that they sacrifice some of themselves to achieve fulfillment.

Tags Damien Chazelle

Review

Snow Day (2022)

Typically when I spend most of the runtime wondering “Who was this movie made for?” I mean that as a negative.

Tags 2022

Capsule

Till (2022)

Till is very much not the kind of movie I typically like, but it’s one of the better specimens of that racism-misery-porn Oscar bait subgenre. It’s also notably restrained — the famous murder takes place off-screen, and the film doesn’t linger too long on the horrifying image of the dead body.

This is really the Danielle Deadwyler show, and she absolutely knocks it out of the park. It’s a real powerhouse turn that does feel like an Oscar snub, though there are none I’m itching to kick off (haven’t seen Blonde yet, though).