For Stiller, apparently, James Thurber’s classic story is occasion to craft what eventually amounts to a totem to his own vanity.
Gloria is an affectionate, lightly comic, yet unsparing gaze at a middle-aged woman’s day-to-day travails.
The interpolations of “heavenly” sequences of Jeremy Lin playing basketball against CGI backdrops offer a hokey visual analogue for the intersection of faith and sports in his life.
The more movies he makes, the more Paul Greengrass’s have-it-both-ways m.o. as a filmmaker becomes clearer.
Anthony Wong does a creditable job of conveying Ip Man’s reflectiveness through his twilight years, occasionally cutting through the hagiographic nature of the enterprise.
If you grant the documentary its slanted perspective at the outset, it works well as its own state-of-the-union address.
It offers the ins and outs of the world of wine as an implicit metaphor for art appreciation.
Its discursiveness does have the intriguing effect of leaving behind a myriad of impressions about its subjects rather than settling on pat interpretations.
Ron Maxwell’s film, from beginning to end, exudes all the excitement of a textbook history lesson.
Its myriad impressions never quite add up to anything coherent, but perhaps the incoherence is precisely the point.
Waxwork is thankfully free of The Cabin in the Woods’s smugness.
One minor point of interest comes in the form of Jason himself—more specifically, the actor playing him.
Not even its problematically touristic gaze is enough to derail the fascination of this tale’s many nightmarish twists and turns.
The Machine impresses on the strength of both its ideas and its evocative style.
Kat Coiro’s film is a frustrating case of a great opportunity blown.
Richard Raaphorst’s film may not reinvent the found-footage wheel, but at least it has visual imagination and the freshness of its setting on its side.
Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.
Its perspective may be above it all, but that doesn’t account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly.
Like it or not, Cheap Thrills does evince a consistent vision, however sophomoric.
Downloaded, a chronicle of the rise and fall of Napster, falls on the more conventional end of the documentary spectrum.