The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman’s fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle’s attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.
An astute summation of Mike Leigh’s glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.
In its final season, Boardwalk Empire seems determined to follow up on the show’s early tag line, “You can’t be half a gangster.”
Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film’s consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.
Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Tourneur or Lang, Miller’s overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.
A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.
For a series that had to switch networks to provide closure for the open-ended third season, there’s no grand expressive sense of ending.
Partners is bad even by most lawyer-joke standards, and the writing’s falseness and laziness carries over to the performances.
By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz’s backsides.
It’s hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff’s film as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.
Its second season is no more or less disappointing than a grand seduction that concludes with a minute-long roll in the hay.
Criterion gives this unclassifiable work, one of their earliest DVD releases, an astonishing transfer and plenty of extras on this BD upgrade.
Forty years on, Davis’s stirring, undiluted condemnation of the Vietnam War retains its devastating power.
The series is a hungry anticipation for what machines can and will do, but it only has a cursory interest in the complex humans that built them.
The end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.
Matthew Weiner and company make a point of echoing Cutler’s flippantly opportunistic nature twice over before the episode concludes.
Ultimately, the time-traveling conceit feels like a shameless ploy to further expand the franchise’s narrative universe.
The more overwhelming intimation of the title is the idea of making plans in general, and the unwavering fallibility of said activity.
It’s easy enough to say that this is the most substantial and refreshingly untamed episode of Mad Men’s seventh season so far.