Popular reviews

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  Review by BRAT ★★★★ 6

  out of all eight 2020 releases i’ve seen (lol), Shirley is by far my favorite. josephine decker has acheived auteur status — just like in Madeline’s Madeline, the camera swirls around her characters, the framing focusing on fragments of their faces, proffering a dreamy drift through the woods of vermont. it blurs the line between muse and friend and lover, and highlights the tendency of artists to take advantage of the people who inspire them most. should a muse be honored? disgusted? resentful? 

  there are so many stories about eccentric older male geniuses and their pretty young muses, but this is one of the only ones i’ve seen where said genius is a woman. shirley is messy and spiteful and capricious…

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★ 9

  good movie for a person like me, whose chief complaint about Midsommar was "there's not enough stuff about grad school"

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 5

  “you could run, run fast away from me but you don’t. why don’t you? why do you stay?”

  sometimes the strange bonds we find ourselves ensnared in can free us, change us. this might be less about the bond itself and more about the abstract changing, but it’s fascinating either way. the porch swing scene might be the best of the year so far. i know what i’m about

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  Review by aaron ★★★★ 4

  unhinged elisabeth moss should be a new film genre at this point

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  Review by karsten ★★★★ 10

  The only thing stranger than Josephine Decker’s work is Michael Stuhlbarg’s face.

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  Review by laura ★★★★ 2

  haunting AND horny?! as soon as elisabeth moss said she was a witch, i was all in. would personally love for her to come over to my house, fill her wine glass to the brim, pour the rest of the bottle all over the couch and then grab my face and tell me i’m boring.

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  Review by iana ★★★★½ 6

  unlike anything josephine decker has made before and yet her fingerprints are everywhere. what a fascinating, thrilling, hypnotic mind trip. the kind of film that gives you goosebumps.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★ 3

  When the news first broke that “Madeline’s Madeline” filmmaker Josephine Decker would be making a starry movie about the author Shirley Jackson, it was hard not to be disappointed (or at least caught by surprise) that one of the most feral, elastic, and vividly singular artists of contemporary American cinema was following her first masterpiece with something that might be classified as a biopic. Shudder. Speaking as one of Decker’s still-fervent devotees, the hope was that her next project would find her reaching deeper into her own mind instead of squeezing her immense talents into the architecture of someone else’s imagination, and the fear was that the financial demands of a period piece would constrain her uniquely generative creative process.…

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  Review by justmiaslife ★★★★½ 3

  Logan Lerman returns as the white boy of the month, Michael Stuhlbarg is the only person ever to portray a Jewish and poetical professor because he has set the standards to high and Elizabeth Moss delivers her most frightening and layered performance to date. It‘s her year.

  „Shirley“ is dreamlike, blends reality together with fiction and mixes drama with suspense. It almost feels like a dark fairytale, because it is completely hypnotizing, there is so much crammed into such a short of run time and oh my gosh is it visually beautiful. It often times feels like the mist in the morning that whirls up it‘s surroundings. It‘s a picture that is so good that you‘re connected even to the smallest detail. And believe me, this one will stay with you for a while.

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  Review by katie ★★★★

  i feel the exact same way about shirley that i felt about madeline's madeline: uncomfortable, somewhat disgusted, a little in love, and ready to never watch it again.

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  Review by muriel ★★★★

  peggy olson goes sicko mode

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  Review by vern ★★★ 3

  this is just mother! for english lit majors