nick rostov

So much attention was lavished on stunning costumes, heart-melting lighting and bits of glittery dust drifting through the air that everybody forgot to generate actual excitement. Everything is foregone, and not because we know the story -- I mean, we know the story of Romeo and Juliet, but it still gets us everytime. This movie lays there -- grandly gorgeously but intertly because though there there's a lot of raging around that looks like emotion,it's all really just galvanic reanimation of something far from alive.

I love nothing more than a good movie cry. I was excited all day to go see this movie and have a good movie cry. Alas my eyes have never been dryer. Overwrought and self important to the point of self-parody. At some hyper-dramatic moments I did hear some laughter in the theater, so I wasn't alone, but my wife sobbed her eyes out pretty much beginning to end, so maybe I went in with too much expectation. Also I am a rabid fan of Chloe Zhao and could feel little of her extraordinarily unique voice in this movie - she seems to have been subsumed into the Spielberg/Mendes brainwave. Kudos all around to the craft -- design, music, wardrobe, lighting.

I'm trying to figure out whether or not this is the worst movie I've ever seen. I'm leaning toward not, because the first fifteen minutes are sublime. Truly. As breathless and tense and real as the opening of MIdnight Express, where you know that somebody in a foreign country is about to make the worst move of their life and that only hell will follow, and you feel powerless to stop it. But once Lucy gets inside that building, all attempt to tell an emotionally or narratively coherent story are tossed squarely out the window, and from that point on not a single thing any character does is what that character would do in any given situation. Plus dull and no attempt to establish emotional stakes, except for one very affecting conversation between a mother and a daughter which, like those opening fifteen minutes, saves this, barely, from being the worst movie I have ever seen.