Danny Boyle’s film can’t help but land in the same hagiographizing place as nearly every single other Great Man biopic churned out by the studio powers that be.
This adaptation attunes itself expertly to the very real dangers staring back at Carol and Therese.
Its sin is its willingness to interrogate ripped-from-the-headlines topicalities in service of an essentially rote idea.
It’s most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.
He hopes The Look of Silence can push Indonesia toward something like a Truth and Reconciliation Committee.
Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix’s collaboration on Irrational Man’s antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.
A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of “self-defense,” enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.
It can’t tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.
It’s the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy’s performance that anchors the film’s many winning blind-alley gags.
This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as “workmanlike” when it’s really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.
The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.
As characters digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, it evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.
One’s ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.
It lays bare that the franchise’s most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.
Salome Alexi’s superb film delicately skewers its characters’ expectations for the post-Soviet good life.
The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters’ words or their substitutive gestures.
Johanna Hamilton’s 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.
Unlike Lucious and their three sons, Cookie emerges from prison uncorrupted by success and the only character strong enough to mount a proper challenge to Lucious’s glitzed-out hypocrisy.
Philip Roth’s original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino’s performance.
The filmmaker draws strength from affixing viewers to one rigid perspective, and then refusing to let them blink.