The dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice.
Its criticism is rooted in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.
Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.
The flippancy toward thematic concerns and character construction suggests that the film was largely built from used parts.
It still strides like a behemoth, but the extras are sadly as inconsequential as the crowds rushing around our unlikely hero’s massive feet.
All of Scott Frank’s thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with ’90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.
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.