The film’s visual construction is spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.
A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.
The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it’s compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach’s sloppy, pedantic delivery.
Charles Lane’s follies are enmeshed within bigger pictures of reality, reestablishing the film’s thesis of comedy as a mode of survival.
Costa-Gavras’s new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
We chatted with the director and exec producer of The Square about their forlorn, harrowing study of dissent.
Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme’s light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.
The film can boast of an exotic locale and rare potential, but in Magidson’s hands the filmmaking is disappointingly shopworn.
Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.
An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.
The most enduring critique leveled against the cinema du look is its fixation on surface.
This supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.
Addiction films are usually propaganda without a specific base.
It’s hard to avoid feeling that the film would have worked better with Danko flying solo.
Uwe Boll’s insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.
James Glickenhaus’s film deals in chest hair.
The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.
I was so excited to see the film as a kid that I nearly vomited after getting my ticket punched.
Despite the intensity of its scope and research, the doc is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can’t jibe with the times.
It foists its own retelling of Davis’s story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.