97
Spirited Away review
A sulky ten-year-old wanders into a world of spirits, loses her name, and has to work for a living. Miyazaki's most complete film and his most quietly…
★★★★★ 5.0/5
Senior Critic
Nadia Brekke
Nadia Brekke joined AJ Movie Reviews after five years covering international cinema for a Scandinavian culture magazine. She writes primarily on animation, science fiction, and non-English-language film, and she has a particular interest in how genre films carry political argument. She has served on two regional festival juries and programmes a monthly repertory screening series.
Genre is not a limitation. It is a vocabulary, and the films that last are the ones that use it to say something the audience already half knew.
Specialisms
- Animation and hand-drawn cinema
- International and non-English-language film
- Science fiction and speculative fiction
- Genre as political argument
- 8Reviews published
- 2021Writing here since
- OsloBased in
Reviews by Nadia Brekke
All 8 reviews, highest scored first.
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97
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94
Inception review
A heist film with five simultaneous timelines and an emotional core about mourning. The spectacle is the delivery system; the guilt is the payload.
★★★★½ 4.8/5
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94
The Matrix review
A hacker learns his reality is a simulation and spends two hours deciding what to do about it. The action was revolutionary; the ideas were older than…
★★★★½ 4.8/5
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93
Toy Story review
A cowboy doll and a space ranger learn to share a boy's affection. The first fully computer-animated feature and still one of the best-written.
★★★★½ 4.8/5
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92
Blade Runner 2049 review
A replicant blade runner uncovers a secret that could collapse the distinction between human and manufactured. Patient, beautiful, and uninterested in…
★★★★½ 4.7/5
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92
Everything Everywhere All at Once review
A laundromat owner discovers she must connect with parallel versions of herself to save existence, and the film turns out to be about a mother and a d…
★★★★½ 4.7/5
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92
Interstellar review
An unusually earnest science-fiction film that treats relativity as a source of grief. When it works it is overwhelming; when it explains itself it st…
★★★★½ 4.7/5
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91
Dune review
The first half of Frank Herbert's novel, adapted with unusual fidelity and an extraordinary sense of scale. Patient, enormous, and confident.
★★★★½ 4.7/5
Index
Year, genre and score for every review.
| Film | Year | Genre | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spirited Away | 2001 | Animation | 97 |
| Inception | 2010 | Sci-Fi | 94 |
| The Matrix | 1999 | Sci-Fi | 94 |
| Toy Story | 1995 | Animation | 93 |
| Blade Runner 2049 | 2017 | Sci-Fi | 92 |
| Everything Everywhere All at Once | 2022 | Sci-Fi | 92 |
| Interstellar | 2014 | Sci-Fi | 92 |
| Dune | 2021 | Sci-Fi | 91 |
How to reach the team
We answer every substantive email, publish corrections when we get things wrong, and welcome disagreement with our scores. If you think a review misreads a film, tell us why — the argument is more interesting than the verdict.