Bicycle!

• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018): Expecting a wildly popular movie to be bad is never a good thing. With middling reviews, I kept wondering what’s wrong with BR, which painted some clear expectations for me. And so, I found out what was wrong: it’s bad movie-making, structurally unsound and mostly uninvolving. Bar for the last ten minutes, which consisted of a few musical numbers that left me with a bit of a pump (because the music is good), only the performance of Rami Malek is worth the hard drive this movie was shot on. 5/10

We Are the Children

• Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019): Half-interesting, but mostly uninspired and depressing, any attempt to synthesize the essence of Brexit in 90 minutes was bound to come up short. There’s a lot of preaching, a lot of they’re right, but they’re right, but #fakenews, yet it’s all for show, with little to chew on. The portrayal of this behind-the-scenes mastermind has some merit, even if it remains unexplored for the most part. Any world where Brexit exists is a sad, effin world. Fuck. 6/10

Let’s Start Giving

• Wildlife (2018): Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan wrote, while the former directed this thoroughly engaging piece on parental angst, which there’s too little of in movies to begin with. Jerry and Janette’s family of three, with son Joe in the mix, starts tearing at the seams when Jerry loses his job, fails to evade the rut of mid-life disappointment, then heads off to fight some forest fires for pennies, instead of taking care of his family. Janette takes a different spin of things, not particularly laudable either, with Joe having to cope with his parents’s disenchantment by himself. Sounds dire – well, it is dire, but it’s also topical and real, a dissection of sensitive youth in the headlights of midlife drama. 8/10

There’s a Choice We’re Making

• Life, Animated (2016): A touching, if not particularly riveting documentary on the cause of Owen Suskind, an autistic child turned adult who is about to take on life by himself. The twist of Owen’s fate is how he has grown up to understand the world and express himself through Disney movies – something, I reckon, we all do, to some degree or another. Sure, it’s not always Disney, but there’s this structure we expect to see reflected in our lives, through which we define it and ourselves. In spite of its tameness, Life, Animated is worth a watch. 7/10

It’s You and Me

• Into the Forest (2015): Ellen Page, Evan Rachel Wood and Callum Keith Rennie (!!) star in this post-apocalyptic, yet conspicuously zombie-less movie, that looks beautiful, but has a plain, even borderline silly narrative. Set in the not so distant future, with Mad-Max-ian fuel scarcity, but still lush nature to make things feel less oppressive, two sisters and their father try to hold the fort and just…survive. And that’s about it, some stuff goes south, there’s a bit of tension, some harrowing brutality and a pensive conclusion. A bit of a shame, ultimately. 6/10