Any of the film’s attempts at moralizing are subsumed by Kevin Smith’s obsession with taking aim at his critics.
Southside with You may not announce itself as hagiography, but it’s hero-worshipful to its core.
This animated film isn’t willing to completely face the bleakness of its allegory of faith versus skepticism.
The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.
Meera Menon’s film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.
Its messy pile-up of comic diversions can be exhilarating in the moment—the chaos of an id given free rein.
The Purge: Election Year’s violent scenarios feel unhinged from recognizable social or moral outrages.
It resonates as a portrait of artists trying to figure out their own paths toward making valuable contributions to the world.
The film’s lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.
Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.
It’s unclear how witnessing a family deal with their specific issues affects Jesus’s own perspective on his destiny.
More galling than the film’s litany of melodramatic banalities is its regressive view of race relations.
The film touches on the effects of a culture that puts too much emphasis on winning and money at the expense of simple healthy competition.
Katie Holmes’s character encapsulates her film as a whole: more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.
It all climaxes in a literal wrestling with the self that suggests a character finally grasping her own limits as an actress.
Nerdland exudes a self-satisfied smugness in its unvaried focus on the worst of human behavior.
Olds’s film is essentially a standard backwoods noir tale given a topical twist.
It broadly tackles the subject of love without, even at its least successful, stooping to the dire, barrel-scraping cultural condescension of Rio, I Love You.
Here’s a concert film that’s as fixated on backstage interactions as it is on the live performances themselves.
All traces of grit from Carney’s earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.