Richard Lawson

There’s a bracingly alive quality to The Tale, as if it’s sentient and thinking in real time, giving the piece a gripping immediacy.

I love how open and casual this film is about Colette’s budding queerness, how it eschews any awkward coming out or pains-of-the-closet stuff. Instead it simply revels in Colette’s sexual and romantic freedom, suggesting that it was just that looseness, that liberation that gave her writing such verve.

Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.

Though all three sections of the film have didactic bits when big ideas are plainly stated, the bulk of Monsters and Men renders huge issues with a fluid understatement. But that disarming pensiveness and interiority doesn’t forget the anger and sadness of the story—instead, it somehow heightens it, affording these characters a grounded texture that casts their struggles in a piercingly humane light.