The film advances that old Hollywood trope: Blacks can’t get justice unless whites are willing to get it for them.
The film’s biggest liberty is to make Poirot’s ultimate decision more palatable for American sensibilities.
Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here they just take the money and run.
Throughout, the narrative padding is conspicuous, and the copious references to better films are gratuitous, even lazy.
While the scares don’t quite work, Jungle revels in a different aspect of horror-thrillers: the gross-out.
The film gives Una a little more agency, but director Benedict Andrews often invalidates such empowerment.
One teen’s transformation into a serial killer isn’t credible compared to the portrait of idle suburban adolescence.
It’s the obnoxious equivalent of trying to have a serious conversation with people who are high out of their minds.
The film successfully argues that it’s through sensory details that we access the deeper aspects of our lives.
When Measure for Measure’s noisy stage business quiets down, Simon Godwin’s production is powerful.
The film has a bad habit of dropping the psychological inquiries to dully go through the genre motions.
The Transfiguration is at its strongest when navigating the story’s uneasy relationship to its genre.
Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s film is, above all, a striking and affecting expression of the desire, repression, and violence.
The film’s storylines fail to inform or intensify each other in any theme-deepening or character-developing ways.
The revival of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a funny and crushing production.
Split is personal and outlandish, with riveting plotting, somber storytelling, and elegant construction.
The show gravitates toward campy burlesque, but the creators have their fun and eat it too.
This production is shadelessly lit for much of its runtime, evoking the drama’s openness, or at least its frankness.
I was so stunned by how many fucks it didn’t give that I stopped wondering if I was laughing with it or at it and wondered if my laughter transcended it.
The stage is an icy expanse and the narrative and the lives of its characters are just as flat as this Midwestern freeze.