It only took half a century, but a film adaptation of Judy Blume's beloved "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" has finally arrived onscreen. As my colleague Melena Ryzik wrote, It is landing "squarely in the middle of today's culture wars," when issues involving the 1970 novel, like censorship — are back at the forefront. "'It's worse than the '80s,' when the author was first targeted, 'because of the way it's coming from government,'" Blume said. |
But what about the movie? In her review for The Times, Lisa Kennedy made it a Critic's Pick, writing, "The director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig's rendering of the book about puberty, family and nascent spirituality offers lessons in how a cherished object, when treated with tender and thoughtful regard, needn't turn precious." |
It's one of several Critic's Picks this week. For Manohla Dargis, "R.M.N.," from the Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu, is a "powerhouse of a movie" set in a Transylvania town where tensions between locals and foreign workers escalate into something "deeper, creepier and unnervingly familiar." She also extolled "The Eight Mountains," which tracks two boys who meet in the Italian Alps in 1984, saying, "One of the movie's pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously." Lastly there's "Polite Society," which Amy Nicholson described as "a rollicking genre mash-up" from Nida Manzoor, "a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy." |
Whatever you decide to watch, enjoy the movies! |
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