The film brings Pixar’s emotional directness to a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture.
Director Timothy Reckart’s The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids’ movie.
The film reinforces the idea that it’s the job of those with disabilities to inspire the jerks of the word to be nicer.
The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.
Mark Webber’s stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film’s center with dignity.
Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.
Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.
It suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.
It passionately covers a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.
Doug Liman’s American Made largely eschews any sense of verisimilitude in favor of wacky comedy bits.
The film ends up as a cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.
Its cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.
Though initially compelling, Peter Nicks’s documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.
Capturing the eerie beauty and pathos of abandoned spaces, it’s sometimes reminiscent of Homo Sapiens.
The documentary goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting.
James Ivory’s Heat and Dust offers plenty of opportunity to luxuriate in exquisite period and location detail.
In the end, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.
The animation’s careful attention to detail is undermined by an anxious pandering to contemporary sensibilities.
Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.
It’s confounding that writer-director Fernando Trueba fails to probe the film’s political implications.