Intruders remains a consistently entertaining and surprising sophomore effort.
The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character’s focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu’s tough, quietly intense performance.
George Clooney’s film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
High Hopes covers a fair bit of ground while remaining generally consistent in quality.
If Kitano does go forward with the rumored third volume, hopefully he’ll conceive of some fresh angle on this increasingly dry material.
The film is eventually revealed as less interested in subverting or playing off its influences than rigorously retracing them.
Black Panties finds Kelly descending into earthly pleasures more intensely than ever, immersed in a sticky, sordid world of pure sexuality.
The film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many ’70s period pieces make painfully overt.
The film loses the original’s sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.
Approaching his lifestyle with ambivalence, the film still shows Jules an almost holy appreciation for the beautiful process of his blacksmithing work.
The film has some pretty divisive issues at its core, ones that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.
Matangi again establishes M.I.A. as one of the most fascinating figures in modern music, but the personal voice underlying her material remains aggravatingly half-baked.
Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.
New is an almost perversely titled album that, at least on the surface, seems like business as usual.
On Caves, Tristen’s formerly distinctive songwriting style is overpowered by uninspired, overbearing production.
Bastards is a mosaic portrait of people driven by base impulses they can’t fully understand.
Pusha T’s stubborn reliance on maintaining his brand on My Name Is My Name is probably not the wisest strategy in today’s shifting hip-hop climate.
Too often the film seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.
The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.
Oh Land’s Wishbone has style to spare, but achieves little else that’s memorable.