Rogue One at least creates its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coasts on existing ones.
The films at this year’s festival offered plenty examples of legacies lived up to and not.
Its searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters’ sense of uncertainty.
The film finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters and milieu in between the expected plot beats.
Yourself and Yours’s commitment to ambiguity is crucial to its success.
Ken Loach’s film is pock-marked by conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures.
What tends to right Moonlight, even when Jenkins’s style drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.
Derek Cianfrance’s film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis.
The film emphasizes its heroes’ inter-personal dynamics, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.
Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
In its relentless repetition, the album becomes a virtually stoical incarnation of anonymous hate.
YG largely trades the personal for the political—and gives up very little of the partying.
The album offers an even more vibrant collection of colorful, propulsive beats than Nick Jonas did.
The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn’s film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.
Coming into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it looked like the programmers had come up with one of their strongest lineups in a long time.
Verhoeven’s Elle insists on realizing its central character through bold eccentricities.
For the Dardennes, this is typical moral-message territory, which they approach too deliberately.
Dolan adapts a talky play into something that could feasibly have the same emotional effect as a silent film.
Mendonça Filho’s message in Aquarius is for a Brazil to recognize the strength and power of its heritage.
For Assayas and Almodóvar, their films represent holding patterns like those that their characters can’t escape from.