What Red Sparrow wishes it was

Rating: 9/10 (24 August 2018)

Honestly, after having just watched the film, I'm struggling to find anything I didn't like about it. "Inspired by true events", I'm confident there were artistic liberties and shortcuts taken in order to tell the tale, but I'm sure other reviews have parsed the details. What I appreciated was the gripping and suspenseful storytelling, and when I realized after the fact that Spielberg was the director, I wasn't surprised. I'm not a Tom Hanks fan at all, but I can say he knocks it out of the park with this one. Everything felt genuine and period correct. The film is thoughtful and makes you think about some higher themes, while making you want to concentrate on what is happening so that you don't miss anything. It covers a lot of ground, and it probably helped that I didn't really know much about the events in question. The dialogue is witty and on point (see, Hollywood, you can still do it when you want to), and some scenes are quite moving. This movie is proof that you don't need sado-masochistic torture scenes and embarrassing soft porn to have a gripping spy movie. The *only* reason I am not giving it 10 stars is because the f-bomb gets dropped twice and completely unnecessarily. This is a film that children could watch, but that mars it unfortunately.