The film belongs firmly to Steve Coogan, which is fortunate since none of the film’s supporting players prove to be the least bit memorable.
In the world of the film, miracles exist, faith is the wisest operating principle, and intelligent thought is everywhere discouraged.
The film is an eloquent tribute to the oppositional figures who helped shape our country’s authentic history.
Among its achievements, Pineapple Express makes explicit much of the underlying homoeroticism inherent in the buddy movie.
Dorothy Fadiman does a fine job outlining the ways in which the integrity of our electoral process is repeatedly undermined by fraud.
The film is largely compelling in its consideration of the struggles of musicians to meld their art with a political message.
It takes great pains to tart up its mildly intriguing subject matter, but its aesthetic overload finally proves more exhausting than illuminating.
The world moves alarmingly on, but we remain the same, as continually locked down by one mode of living as another.
Roger Weisberg’s Critical Condition offers a salutary lesson in the difference in viewer response between the fiction and the nonfiction film.
If the filmmakers remain a largely passive on-screen presence, they soon find they’re not entirely unaffected by the project.
It’s not all cold-blooded murder and nihilistic despair. After all, this is a comic adventure, even if the comedy often reeks with the stink of death.
In The Order of Myths, the legacy of slavery lingers on far past its historical moment.
There’s something fundamentally suspect about a film whose appeal is so heavily predicated on a mirthful contemplation of human innards.
The film feels as moribund as Malcolm McDowell’s character lying on his deathbed in the opening scene.
Marco Bellochio’s Wedding Director is consistently pleasant from first to last.
Purdy’s feeling for the patterns of individual speech, often expressed in first-person narration, tends to surprise the reader with an unforeseen potency.
This is a dull psychological thriller every bit as dispensable as any of the lurid offerings of Gil Kofman’s fictional counterpart.
Méliès’s world may be marked by an atmosphere of wondrous possibility, but it’s also reflective of a perpetual frustration.
What emerges from the documentary is both a clear sense of Hurston’s artistic achievement and the image of a defiantly outspoken individual.
The Brave One reduces our experience of the world with its drab and unimaginative aesthetic presentation.