The Austin Chronicle’s Top 10 list, listed alphabetically, is the combined effort of Chronicle film critics Kimberley Jones and Richard Whittaker and film critic emeritus Marjorie Baumgarten, who was this week named the Austin Film Critics Association’s first Member Emeritus. Avatar: Fire and Ash Blue Moon Frankenstein It Was Just an Accident Marty Supreme Nouvelle […]
Kimberley Jones
A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women in Media named her “Unsung Print Hero” in 2022.
Posted inFilm Review
The Secret Agent Review: A Pulp Fiction With Political Resonance
The title of writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film was Pictures of Ghosts, and his latest, The Secret Agent, opens with pictures of ghosts, too, of a sort. They are black & white photos of a bygone Brazil, pictures of 1970s-era merrymaking – drinking, singing, dancing. You’d never imagine these photos were taken in the […]
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Hamnet Review: Goodnight, Sweet Prince
The how and why behind the death of William Shakespeare’s only son at age 11 is lost to history. But novelist Maggie O’Farrell plausibly imagined plague as the cause, a narrative choice that had unanticipated resonance when her novel Hamnet was first published in March of 2020. The novel – and now the feature film […]
Posted inWe Have an Issue
A Season for Giving
I think it was around this time last year that our publisher Cassidy Frazier wondered aloud about doing a nonprofit issue timed to Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday, the annual global day of giving that follows the holiday. We were all feeling pretty raw after the election, but still – I don’t think any of us […]
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Review: The Bad Dads of Jay Kelly and Sentimental Value
Jay Kelly arrives at a weird prolonged moment in Hollywood. It’s a movie about a movie star, released at a time when movie stars’ heyday has passed, and it is more or less loving in its lens on the movie industry, and by extension the theatrical experience, even as distributor Netflix poses an existential threat […]
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Peter Hujar’s Day Review: Being Alive
In his first feature since 2023’s electric pas de trois Passages, Ira Sachs enlists Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in a most curious experiment that somehow avoids coming off like a gimmick. A slim two-hander, Peter Hujar’s Day dramatizes a 1974 conversation between the writer Linda Rosenkrantz and her friend, acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar, conducted […]
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Die My Love Review: Mommy Weariest
Tradwives may rule a uniquely hellish pocket of the internet, but in arthouse film at least, Grim Mommy is ascendant, with an emerging canon presenting a more clear-eyed portrait of women buckling under domestic stress – in last year’s Nightbitch, this fall’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinatory picture of […]
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Austin Film Festival Review: You’re Dating a Narcissist!
A sparky cast and scenic vistas can’t quite overcome the suffocating singlemindedness of You’re Dating a Narcissist! That’s not just the name of the film – it’s also the title of a book written by psychology professor and podcaster Judy (Marisa Tomei), as well as Judy’s default diagnosis of basically anyone in a relationship, from […]
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Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review: A Rock God Turns Down the Volume
In contrast to Bruce Springsteen’s working-class wail, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is comparatively soft-spoken. It chronicles the period of time in the early Eighties when the ascendant rock star retreated to New Jersey to write Nebraska and grapple with a deepening depression, tonally adopting the same tempo and shadings of that now-legendary album – […]
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Urchin Review: A First-Time Director, and a Star-Making Performance
It’s not that movies about homelessness don’t exist; it’s just that the worst examples turn homeless people into plot drivers for the “real” heroes of the story, there to teach empathy or perspective or some other life lesson. In contrast, Urchin, written and directed by Babygirl breakout Harris Dickinson (who also co-stars), singlemindedly dramatizes the […]
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After the Hunt Review: Luca Guadagnino Goes Hunting for Sacred Cows
Julia Roberts has almost exclusively trafficked in contemporary stories; her bawdy laugh and mischief-making eyes don’t really jibe with period garb. But her new role in After the Hunt – a self-consciously au courant piece whacking at the double hornet’s nests of campus politics and the #MeToo movement – had me blinking in surprise, and […]
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A House of Dynamite Review: A Popcorn Panic-Inducer
A House of Dynamite – Kathryn Bigelow’s return to the military and intelligence milieus of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, arguably her two most heralded films – opens with a text block contextualizing the Cold War and how superpowers came to a mutual understanding that the world is a much better place with […]