gerard mcgrath

I wanted to like this film more than I did. I wished Stephan James, the male lead, had kept his shirt on. We have onscreen now a surfeit of guys who look like gym rats. (It's tiresome.) Must be all that sculpting the budding artist does that sculpts the body too. I felt a kind of aestheticized remoteness wafting off this film. The picture pays some price for its beauty, I think. I trust it less. The real life pain and anguish can hardly surface out of the lachrymose presentation of sentiment. There is, to my eye, too much of a costuming glow to the whole thing. Slow-mo should take a long sleep, since it's a form of pleading on behalf of artistry.