The feminist bent of Robyn’s quest nicely shadows the John Curran’s film without ever being stated aloud.
Craig Johnson’s film is ultimately most interested in what its jokes are implying or obscuring about the jokesters themselves.
By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.
The film is uproariously funny, but its laughs don’t come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
The internal crisis of its protagonist amounts to the flicking of an on/off switch rather than the ebb and flow of a consciousness being born.
A kind of silent opera in which the actors’ precise facial emoting and a muscular editing rhythm create a melodrama by turns horrific and hilarious.
However self-aware the film may be, its characters and moods and conflicts are too over-determined and familiar to linger in the memory very long after the credits roll.
A film of obvious characterizations and even more obvious plot machinations that render its moment-to-moment charms moot.
It treats its characters as placeholders for philosophical arguments and spends the majority of its running time trying to “solve” existential mysteries without adequately exploring them.
What could have been a spirited dissection of Jay-Z’s optimistic enterprise is instead merely an advertisement for it.
The film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the antiheroine’s bratty passivity.
It’s a film that lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.
Though ambitiously busy, the film is also self-sabotaging and stagnant, showcasing its main character’s struggles without interpreting them into a cohesive thesis.
Martin Provost creates not so much a dichotomy of femininity as a funhouse mirror of it.
Soul alone does not make a film, and Hellion is a wispy and timid piece despite its loud bark.
It frequently uses sass as a smokescreen, hiding what’s unoriginal and cheaply sentimental about this story behind a veil of witticisms about oblivion and “cancer perks.”
The film’s increasingly unnerving story mostly unfolds with minimal flair, intensely focused as it is on its steely and enigmatic protagonist.
It takes the easiest approach to every scene, haphazardly juggling different tones without integrating them into a cohesive and consistent thematic identity.
Director David Gordon Green finds a balance between symbolism and realism in his storytelling that allows the film to be many things at once.
The tetchy band of thirtysomethings’ interpersonal problems are infinitely less compelling than the mysterious and original global disaster the filmmakers have devised.
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