★★
Just as a critic is ready to stop preceding praise for a Lego Movie with the adverb ‘surprisingly’, the franchise delivers a dud. The Lego Ninjago Movie is every bit as commercially dominated as you were sure that The Lego Movie was going to be but wasn’t. Yes, for fans of its two surprisingly great predecessors, this latest $70m advert is every bit like stepping barefoot on a rogue brick. Not quite a total shambles, it may already be time to call it a day on Lego cinema.
★★★★
The list of things that Battle of the Sexes isn’t really about is one longer than an Isner/Mahut game. For one, it’s not really about tennis. It’s also, in a funny way, not really about the battle or even the sexes. From directing duo Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, here is a film about lost souls on the margins of society and how they deal with the rough road that life has thrown their way. Fundamentally, this is a film about equality for all sectors of society and a reminder of just how far from over the struggle really is.
★★★
There were two available avenues down which The Glass Castle, Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ likewise-titled memoir, could have traveled. On the one hand, a ‘glass castle’ is symbolically suggestive of fragility, insecurity and hollow grandeur; on the other, it is a image that conjures nostalgic ideas of the fairytale ‘far, far away’s of childhood tales. In hindsight, it is a shame that Cretton leant to the latter. His Glass Castle is a film of many isolated successes, which are sadly let down a misjudged and inconsistent tone.
The Film Blog 