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Felicia Feaster
Tomatometer-approved critic
I am a longtime journalist based in Atlanta and have been writing film criticism since 1994, full-time for decades at the Atlanta alternative weekly Creative Loafing and now at the online arts magazine Burnaway.org and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I hold an undergraduate and graduate degree in film from, respectively, the University of Florida and Emory University, where my master's thesis became a book: Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film. My film writing has also been published in Film Quarterly, Cineaste and Charleston City Paper. I am the co-founder of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle.
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) |
Another feel-good warm bath of niceness set amidst the Brits, A New Era feels like a period answer to Ted Lasso, a similarly sweet confection in which simple goodness always prevails and everyone is relatively well-behaved. - Riverfront Times
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| Posted May 19, 2022
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Petite Maman (2021) |
This is not a children’s movie but one, instead, that records in exacting detail the unique perception, imagination and even the slower, more prolonged sense of time that defines how children experience the world. - Riverfront Times
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| Posted May 12, 2022
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No Exit (2022) |
No Exit’s script ladles on the usual plot twists and body horror, introducing new, grisly ways to assault flesh and bone. But the tension is lukewarm. - Riverfront Times
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| Posted Apr 26, 2022
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The Outfit (2022) |
It's largely Rylance who carries the plot on charisma and an onion-peel performance that reveals its layers as The Outfit unfolds. - Riverfront Times
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| Posted Apr 26, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) |
Real life adulting is the ultimate foe to be vanquished in this deliriously haywire fantasy, a cinematic tab of acid buried in a metaphysical fable. - Riverfront Times
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| Posted Apr 26, 2022
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Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) |
Director Eliza Hittman's devastating Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a coming-of-age with a difference. - Culturopolis
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| Posted Jul 23, 2021
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American Psycho (2000) |
Graced with a smart, pathos-laden meditation on male competition and the blood-drawing ferocity of a money-centered culture, along with screenwriter Guinevere Turner, Harron does a transformative voodoo on an often repugnant source. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Punch-Drunk Love (2002) |
[T]here's very little to hold onto in this lackluster, uninspiring film with the disappointing inertness of a deflated balloon. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Raising Victor Vargas (2002) |
Few films capture how hostile and enormous the world can be for children and the defenses they create to cope, but this easygoing, lovely film does, to great, tender effect. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Ten (2007) |
More than simply unentertaining, The Ten comes from an America of silly, laddish self-regard and hollow protest. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Lady Chatterley (2006) |
Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is as exquisite and memorable for the way it burrows beneath its characters' skin, into the discrete and lonely worlds they occupy. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Masked and Anonymous (2003) |
Bloated by self-regard, Masked and Anonymous is the essence of the self-aggrandizing benefit concerts it weakly parodies. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Spider (2002) |
Cronenberg's thoroughly creepy and hypnotic film often has the texture of damp wool, his evocation of claustrophobic brooding so intense you can nearly smell the mildew. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Talk to Her (2002) |
Unfortunately, the Spanish enfant terrible's iconoclastic artistic hysteria never rises to the surface in Talk to Her. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Auto Focus (2002) |
For all its tantalizing forays into the narcotic, head-swimming loss of self and perspective in addiction, Auto Focus never quite extends its sympathy to its characters or convinces us that they are real people. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Quiet American (2002) |
The Quiet American is an accurate if not entirely soul-quaking adaptation of Greene's style to film. It establishes such a believable atmosphere of quiet, old-fashioned gentility that when a moment of violence occurs, the carnage is even more devastating. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Frida (2002) |
The strangest of birds - a film about a Communist, bisexual, hirsute, maverick artist aimed squarely at a mainstream audience - Frida may, in fact, turn out to be more radical than it first appears. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Wordplay (2006) |
Diverting though Wordplay may be, when it moves into tournament-mode, the film suffers from the essentially undramatic nature of this solitary "sport." - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Twilight Samurai (2002) |
Twilight Samurai contains a powerful pacifist message about a hero free from the supposedly innate male taste for violence. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Murderball (2005) |
Murderball tends to buck the feel-good vibe and good guy-bad guy arc of that genre... Instead, the film depicts a more profound and lifelong battle waged between these men and the circumstance they find themselves in. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Everything Is Illuminated (2005) |
Rather than aiming to please, the film expects a certain patience on the viewer's part as it ambles and slowly shifts from an often forced quirkiness to a bone-deep melancholy. That change of tack proves worth waiting for. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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One Hour Photo (2002) |
While honoring the suspense-building engine of a thriller, One Hour Photo creates a nightmare portrait of American life. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Birth (2004) |
Glazer leaves narrative threads dangling and a purposeful ambiguousness that seems less a desire to subvert Hollywood closure as a fey, fancified gesture of presumed depth on the film's part. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Art School Confidential (2006) |
Art School Confidential is as visually uninteresting as it is idea-parched. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Kandahar (2001) |
Less interesting as a Westerner's primer on Afghanistan's horrors, the film becomes truly transfixing when it assumes the languid, neorealist style of the Iranian cinema. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Namesake (2006) |
[Nair's] film covers so much ground that it's hard to sustain emotional investment in its characters. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004) |
[A] ponderously "important" but emotionally hollow analysis of infidelity's cruel undertow. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Pretty Persuasion (2005) |
Pretty Persuasion is a slutty little movie pretending to be an important one. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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XX/XY (2002) |
A film about the necessity of growing up could have profited from its own advice. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Girl on the Bridge (1999) |
Girl on the Bridge is pure, buttery fantasy with all the attendant empty calories. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Old Joy (2006) |
If you succumb to its unique rhythms and let it, Old Joy is a film that will break your heart. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Forty Shades of Blue (2005) |
Their script is infused with the romantic highs and lows of a million country songs. But it's the haunting melody, soaked in longing and agony that words can convey only in small part, that really gets you. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) |
It's hard to fault Anderson for striving - with clearly considerable effort - to create a film world more complete and satisfying than the real one. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Color Me Kubrick (2005) |
Color Me Kubrick is not without its wacky charms principally driven by John Malkovich's contortions as Conway. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) |
Marrying extreme set design and sublime casting... Burton's film showcases his usual interest in gothic effects and the original Willy Wonka's psychedelia. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Sylvia (2003) |
When there are so few stories dedicated to female creativity and pathos, you resent this one all the more for mishandling what might have been. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela (2004) |
What is clearly a sacred event to the Indian and non-native participants becomes a crazed, depth-less spectacle of cinematic tourism in the hands of the filmmakers, who drop us into the midst of the fracas with no sense of perspective, insight or voice. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Jesus Camp (2006) |
After the filmmakers' 200th shot of kids weeping at the words of the lord, the message changes from educational to freak show. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Inside Deep Throat (2005) |
[S]o much of the material is served up with a wink and "a giggle," the possibilities for real revelation are scarce. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Town & Country (2001) |
A film of low expectations, Town & Country feels like the kind of calculated, lifeless product written by jaded Hollywood hacks in response to what they think middle-America might want. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Send a Bullet (2007) |
[A] bizarre, often riveting film about contemporary Brazil. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Feb 03, 2020
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American Pimp (1999) |
American Pimp is for the most part a depressing, crashing bore, full of sanctimonious, money-obsessed predators with taste that would make Minnie Pearl cringe, selling a dirty business as a higher calling. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Oliver Twist (2005) |
Polanski's Oliver Twist is a flawed but harrowing, empathetic view of the world seen through the eyes of its most powerless and invisible citizens. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Knocked Up (2007) |
Knocked Up crafts pathos and spit-takes from the truism that life will invariably make adults of us all whether we like it or not. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Delirious (2006) |
Delirious is definitive DiCillo: goofy and cartoonish at the edges, at times a little obvious in its caricature of our celebrity-obsessed culture, but humble and funny enough to compel viewers to overlook its flaws. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Breaking and Entering (2006) |
Minghella takes Haneke's gravitas and transforms it into the brand of sorrowful yuppie chow and shallow treatment of alienation favored by angsty Hollywood melodramas such as Crash. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Blue Crush (2002) |
Something just feels right about a girl-power movie in which the football players are the spoiled, clueless ones and the rough-around-the-edges surfer girls look far more world-weary and tough. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) |
When rendered in visual terms, many of the most delicious qualities of Bridget Jones's Diary also become highly smelly, like a wedge of cheese that's overstayed its welcome. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Wet Hot American Summer (2001) |
But like many a "Saturday Night Live" gag, Wet Hot American Summer also can overstay its welcome and drag interminably on, its joke about the longest day in the world backfiring as it moves sputteringly toward a resolution. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Dark Blue (2002) |
Dark Blue is a bitter, often stunning sewer elegy for the little-man-as-monster, the nobody who thinks he's somebody but who is just a stooge trapped within a corrupt system. - Creative Loafing
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| Posted Jan 30, 2020
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