Throughout the film, we come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect.
How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is a comedy of microaggressions.
Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others.
The film is a riot of religious symbolism, of-the-moment socio-political valences, and references to Darren Aronofsky’s work.
The film sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.
Though some of Spettacolo’s tension is superficial, its latent anxieties are myriad and profoundly resonant.
It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.
Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.
The film is indebted to Alexander Payne’s social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.
Good Time is scrupulously designed to address how the urban poor interact and negotiate with city services.
The film succumbs to its main character’s didacticism: His perceived humility masks a smug, Manichean worldview.
The director’s intimate relationships with the RBSS’s heroic journalists help to sustain the film’s undeniable urgency.
Director Tim Smit’s first-person sci-fi caper looks and feels like something Neil Blomkamp might dream up.
How is it that a film so beholden to dull, unnecessary exposition can be so eager to avoid explaining itself?
Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.
David Leveaux’s film cannily incorporates elements of spycraft and sheer trash into a familiar formula.
Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland’s film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.
The Thomas Vinterberg film’s sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.
The film is broadly concerned with portraying the titular Syrian city as a community of neighbors and colleagues.
The Lovers takes some shrewd steps to update the comedy of remarriage for the age of the smartphone.