If it’s meant as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman’s competence in various modes works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.
Spotless Blu-ray presentations such as this will offer the best possible version of comparatively lesser-known gems in Altman’s career.
It finds the actors’ performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.
Throughout 7 Chinese Brothers, Bob Byington’s sense of humor is familiar and facile.
Those familiar with Les Blank’s malleable approach to documentary production will recognize that energy in its nascent form.
The Nightmare seems frustratingly content with alarming us with shock cuts and surface-level boogie monsters.
The film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.
This time around, in spotlighting Liam Neeson’s fatigued charisma, Jaume Collet-Serra’s formidable filmmaking chops have plateaued.
Ethan Hawke’s concentration on Bernstein isn’t a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but an attempt to have a soul-bearing conversation.
For all the emphasis placed on the thick bonds among these men, it’s surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.
Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.
Olive Films makes no sacrifices in presenting Wilder’s misunderstood flop itself in all its uneasy afternoon clarity.
Any masochistic joy that can be derived from watching the film owes to seeing it take its bullheaded conceit to its logical, artless extreme.
Adam Rifkin’s documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews’s crazed passion.
There’s literally no way to miss the memo that It’s All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it’s there in every scene.
Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film’s folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.
Its greatest asset is an attention toward the particulars of its milieu in a way that doesn’t call attention to those period touches.
The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.
The film suggests an unholy hybrid of the aesthetic indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.
Of greatest damage to its coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.