Redbelt is faithfully cast in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï.
Given the hazy historical record concerning Genghis Khan’s life, this portrait must be taken with a modest grain of salt.
Unlike Napoleon Dynamite, the film steers clear of condescension or cruel laughs at its protagonist’s expense.
Trading in shabby trickery, Deception proves painfully incapable of building a better suspense-movie mousetrap.
The film’s amplification of scale and subject matter isn’t, alas, accompanied by an upgrade in humor.
The film is concerned less with the damage caused by the Three Gorges Dam to the environment than to China’s rural citizenry.
Saying The Promotion’s tone is all wrong would imply that it had a tone to begin with.
If Godzilla was a manifestation of Cold War paranoia, the Cloverield monster is a reflection of the chic nihilism that is the J.J. Abrams brand.
It needs more of Tina Fey the sharp, witty writer, as the film is as pedestrian and middling as they come.
Hitchcock’s “Wrong Man” scenario gets an invigorating French update in Tell No One.
It’s hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest.
The past is a terrible secret that can’t be suppressed in Boy A.
This Brit import employs its affectations less for look-at-me egotistical purposes than in service of its story’s core emotions.
It delivers a rather predictable indie coming-of-age narrative, and Levine’s music video-ish sentimentality doesn’t help alleviate such familiarity.
Noise never rises above being a tepid urban fantasy unwisely extended into a slight meditation on modern male powerlessness.
The film is memorable only insofar as its colossal, rank ineptitude will linger in unlucky viewers’ minds for years to come.
The Forbidden Kingdom plays out like the wet dream of kung-fu fanboy nation.
Young@Heart’s worst enemy is its director, Stephen Walker, whose incessant pushing and prodding strives to manipulate in ways both needless and trite.
The film is beholden to high-concept gobbledygook that has almost no bearing on its mystery’s conclusion
Whereas Jason Segel makes smart use of this mopey routine, the same can’t quite be said about the film’s employment of the Apatow template.