L.A. Noire isn’t about exploration or combat, both of which seem to have been included more as tacked-on concessions to hardcore gamers than integral components of the larger story.
In the way it unimaginatively regurgitates familiar genre elements in service of preachy piousness, Scott Charles Stewart’s cinema is the equivalent of Christian rock.
Dax Shepard delivers an I’m Still Here-style mockumentary of staggering incompetence with Brother’s Justice.
It deftly navigates the ins and outs of platonic-pal sentimentality while reveling in the sublime pleasures of gross-out nastiness.
The High Cost of Living is yet another example of the high cost (for moviegoers) of lowered production barriers for aspiring filmmakers.
Everything Must Go is the cinematic incarnation of the color beige.
Cluelessness is characteristic of this latest assembly-line rom com.
Hobo with a Shotgun offers up grindhouse gristle and wit that puts Machete to shame.
With shrewd wit, John Michael McDonagh’s script proceeds to self-reflexively address the very conventions it’s employing.
Class envy leads to Funny Games-ish home invasion in In Their Skin.
Director Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn is a film that ultimately has no guts.
Fast Five and I have something in common: We both have no use for the first four Fast and the Furious films.
The only real lesson learned here is that, regardless of nationality, domestic sitcom pap is a universal language.
The film is is a work of communion, and not only between the present and the past.
This swordfighting epic is delivered with a blockbuster scope and sincerity free of Takeshi Miike’s trademark gonzo insanity.
The film never coheres into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.
Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity.
It may rankle diehards in its reconfiguration of the series’s convoluted lore into a more streamlined, mainstream-accessible good-vs.-evil formula.
This is the type of project in which movie stars indulge their oh-so-serious side via facile stripped-down character drama.
A physics-based puzzle game that prides mental acuity over murderous mayhem, Portal 2 is the phenomenal follow-up that Valve’s 2007 hit deserved.