That it half succeeds, in spite of its cloying self-seriousness, means that it’s at best a convincing copycat of a definitive expression of ego and influence in art.
The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.
John Pogue orchestrates the film’s consistently chilly unease from a series of unassuming jolts embedded in the humdrum.
The literalizing of Ivan Locke’s hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.
Charlie Paul isn’t content to let his stock footage and interviewees lead for him, driven as he is to “make something out of a frame of mind,” though to needlessly busy effect.
It isn’t clear if the gates of this metaphorically muddled fantasy have been thrust open by a victim of bullying or the bully himself.
Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn’t interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.
The film thrillingly plays out as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.
What most matters to Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.
A few jolting scares are deployed throughout, but more difficult to shake is how the story’s overacting lambs walk a rather programmatic path toward slaughter—or at least anal probing.
To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film’s thematic meat.
One can never fully shake the feeling that the sense of unease the filmmakers rouse, every act of seduction, infiltration, and vengeance they orchestrate, is borrowed.
It’s dizzyingly creepy in its refracting of horrors through the cascading windows of computer programs we’ve come to understand more intimately than our own selves.
Mac Carter compromises his intuitive and elegantly framed glances at his main characters’ teenage blues by busily going through amateur-night gesticulations of spooking his audience.
Eugenio Mira thrills in watching Tom attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist’s wily physical maneuvering.
This is a complete list of our predicted winners at the 2014 Academy Awards.
I don’t expect you to read this, and you have every right not to.
This upcoming Sunday, the collective nightmare known as awards season will be effectively over.
The ultimate takeaway here is that predicting this category is a total crapshoot—that, or we don’t know shit.
There’s a great line in Jules and Jim about fictions that “revel in vice to preach virtue.”