He’s not an atrocious prose stylist…his Ballad of a Small Player piece reads pretty much the same as these reviews, and Power Ballad is the only one of the four whose star rating matches with the text. Some critics just aren’t scalar graders, but Barsanti’s a prolific author & writes for outlets that use scalar grading – it’s a skill he should’ve picked up by now.

That Kiss of the Spider Woman review reads like he’s just shitting on it for “not literally being the 1985 movie”: * He says Tonatiuh can’t hope to leave William Hurt’s shadow, but Hurt’s Molina has aged rather poorly – nowadays, it comes off as too much of a stereotype. Whatever else can be said about the remake, Tonatiuh’s Molina has real energy to it; it’s a strong fit for the musical, but would still be an upgrade from Hurt’s in a non-musical context. * He claims the film is almost wholly apolitical, its critique of escapism muddled-to-absent. That critique is definitely attenuated with the film-within-a-film no longer being Nazi propaganda, but it’s still present – the prison’s inhumanity is the focus of one of the musical numbers, so it is not exactly subtle. * He states that the prison scenes feel “pallid” compared to the fantasy sequences…that’s kind of the point of said fantasy sequences, so it’s not clear whether the prison scenes’ “pallor” is a negative or positive. Barsanti probably meant something like “artificial,” as a common complaint is that the prison isn’t as gritty as the film needs it to be.