About Deirdre Crimmins
Deirdre Crimmins is Chicago-based freelance film critic and a member of the Boston Online Film Critics Association. She contributes regularly to FilmThrills, Rue Morgue magazine, and Birth.Movies.Death. Though a lifelong horror film fan, she also loves a good musical or screwball comedy when the mood strikes.
The Vast of Night takes a big gamble in both visual style and storytelling structure, and it hits the jackpot. This close look at a small town’s flirtation with the unknown shows how small stories can have big rewards.
A Great Lamp is the first feature by director Saad Qureshi. While much of it feels like a first voyage and a grand gesture to make a strong impression, the film’s raw emotions make for a humanizing tale of two strangers just...
As riveting as the recent Fyre Fest documentaries have been, Desolation Center shows us that there’s some heart and soul in the history of music festivals.
The Beksińskis. A Sound and Picture Album is a documentary based on a book by Magdalena Grzebałkowska, which is based on the life of painter Zdzislaw Beksinski. A collection of home videos, news footage, diary entries, and essays,...
Lost Holiday seems to fancy itself some sort of crime drama or buddy comedy. I’m not saying that it’s neither, but it does seem to suffer from a lack of passion in its characters, just as those characters suffer from a...
Impetus is nearly impossible to categorize – not because it defies genre, rather it tries to occupy too many of them at once. Fiction, biography, autobiography, documentary and metatextuality all factor heavily into this self-indu...
Hurry Slowly is the rare film that focuses its attention on the quiet times leading up to a major life change, and not the change itself. It’s slow, contemplative, and methodical in its examination of one young woman’s...
Crystal Swan is the official submission from Belarus to the Academy Awards this year, a recognition that it rightly deserves. The film is smart and steeped in decades of Belarusian history, and yet it features relatable characters...
Serenity may be an admirable film on some level, but it’s certainly not a good one. While writer/director Steven Knight (Locke) should be given credit for taking risks and attempting a stylized approach to character and stor...
Arthurian legends are hard to translate to screen, but that has never stopped filmmakers from trying. Though Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King looks to be just another take on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in...
M. Night Shyamalan is his own worst enemy. When he creates small films with deeply personal stories, he shines as a director. However, his grand gestures usually fall flat and earn unintended laughs from the audience. Glass is his...
Replicas is unequivocally a terrible film, filled with terrible writing and terrible performances. The experience of watching it may be fun, if the mood strikes, but “so bad it’s good” is not the same thing as ac...