There’s edifying information in the documentary, but it’s tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.
Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there’s a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.
It’s an intelligent, self-reflexive summer blockbuster with an eye for castigating proliferate franchise mentalities.
If it can’t reconcile all that’s presented in its too-brief runtime, that’s largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.
You won’t feel back-stabbed by the gorgeous audio-visual transfer on this new Blu-ray of Claude Chabrol’s essential film.
A tragedy worth celebrating on Blu-ray, especially given the new 2K restoration and a handful of informative special features.
There’s a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film’s ridiculous and violent denouement.
It operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.
Hossein Amini’s sequences are engineered for narrative efficiency, often at the expense of thematic or affectual aims
As a space-opera lampoon, it’s incoherent primarily because it’s never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.
Nick Broomfield is dedicated to illuminating how personal strife traces to economic subalimentation and historical degradation.
The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
The film’s music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton’s own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis’s unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.
A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
The film is a provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
Thomas Allen Harris’s documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.
It plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei’s prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
It receives the Criterion treatment, bringing Almodóvar’s kinkily irreverent carnival ride to vivid life with a masterful 2K Blu-ray.