It achieves an astonishing immediacy by simply allowing the prostration process to play out over and over with minimal aesthetic interference.
It too often fails to examine how the long shadow cast by Star Wars affected its its background actors’ lives.
The beautiful game, as Pelé called football (or soccer to us Americans), has never felt like such a sedate slog.
Throughout, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson purposely indulge Hollywood formula only to subvert it.
It places more focus on the childish fabulousness of Tom Sawyer than the racial reckoning of Huckleberry Finn.
The film’s larger points essentially fall by the wayside in the name of black comedy that’s largely without genuine edge.
The film is defined by its staunch refusal to clarify its characters’ emotional issues, marooning them instead in the messes those emotions have wrought.
The film’s concern for the reclamation of identity is less important than the dull approximation of The Others’s stark haunted-house atmospherics.
Tolerance in the film doesn’t so much suggest a recognizably real epiphany as it does a moving Hallmark card.
Even as Samba struggles to hold onto his identity, the film becomes entangled in an identity crisis of its own.
It comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.
This emotionally affecting film never loses sight of the ethical complexity of forsaking a community in the name of an individual.
This is a sports movie actually attuned to the knowledge that victory in an inconsequential game bears no meaning.
The film relies on a bevy of spectacularly funny clips and a plethora of talking heads, most falling back on plaudits rather than sage insights.
The film settles into a time-honored groove of so many forgettable juvenile comedies before it.
The film’s images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.
Eventually, the film’s impressive array of formal pyrotechnics overwhelms its morals.
The filmmakers oddly forgoe the abundant elegiac aspects of his film’s factual material for a tone approaching the ebullient.
Ruba Nadda’s film begins as a moodily introspective drama about grief before implausibly morphing into a stale thriller.
Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries occupies a sweet spot between the self-aware and taut.