Eric Henderson

Truong Minh Quy’s new queer romance-cum-sociohistorical lament mines beauty from both collective desolation and individual endurance.

There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.

The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.

Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.

At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.

The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.

There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.

The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.

This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.