Ramin Bahrani’s talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.
It falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of its grand-scale narrative.
This is exactly the kind of movie at which David Wain took aim with his sublime rom-com parody They Came Together.
One of Sergio Corbucci’s lesser-known westerns is scarred by ludicrous casting, but elevated by the integrity of its punchy filmmaking.
Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it’s all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.
The sterling visual transfer allows us to assess the film’s place in history without fighting through material wear and tear.
Experiential specificity might have picked up the slack left by the film’s dearth of psychological nuances.
A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.
An anomalous “baguette western” from the late ’60s comes to home video, and it’s a revelation of harsh, melancholy fatalism.
The anodyne tastefulness of Bryan Reisberg’s film effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.
Criterion’s generous helping of supplements goes a long way in contextualizing the achievement of Carroll Ballard’s entrancing vision.
It broods along as if it’s expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.
The film operates as if under the presumption that the sketchiness of its various insights will be smoothed over.
It fails to supply an emotional punch to match the grandeur of its Lawrence of Arabia-inspired compositions.
A massive, decades-in-the-making cinematic achievement has received the comprehensive home-video treatment.
When the appeal of the film’s whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.
A Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of modern urban life’s hazards.
Greetings to the Ancestors builds a peculiar aura less reducible to the cumulative effect of a series of art-house mannerisms.
These are utterly fascinating snapshots of Ozu’s early fetishization of American cinema as well as truly singular entries in his body of work.
A phony collection of storytelling clichés held under the banner of archetype and lent some weight by the splendor of the landscape.