This movie feels like a travel brochure for visiting America, and not necessarily in a good way. Things kind of just happen to Forrest Gump, and you never get the sense that he has any kind of agency. He’s given life experiences like entreés at a restaurant, dutifully eating them like people expect him to, and then leaving so he can wait for his next meal.

The characters serve their purposes, and Tom Hanks plays his part well, but it feels…

So many movies are content to reuse the same standard recordings of classical music and wave them around like wrinkled old photographs. Yes, they’re certainly iconic, and they can help to set a familiar scene, but their age is apparent, and their tone is often unfitting. Worst of all, many amateur filmmakers have classical music behind glass in case they need “generic” music for a party, and it risks devaluing the pieces that have so much passion put into them.…