Snyder’s space epic plays more to his strengths, but it can’t rise above his weaknesses.
The Song Lantern is, scene for scene, a visual marvel, comparable to the regal sweep of a Mizoguchi film.
The film is so garishly colorful and cute that even rom-com neophytes will find its uninspired adherence to formula borderline-unbearable.
The film might be the year’s most levelheaded cinematic dissertation on our ongoing war on terror.
The film is as vibrant as rhythm and blues, as brainy as the poetry of science, and as emotionally open as you hope your date will be.
Mohammad Rasoulof’s examination of life on board a decrepit tanker in the Persian Gulf is anything but obtuse.
The film feels very much at odds with the popularly accepted view of Mikio Naruse as a stasis-minded chronicler of the modern-day Japanese working class.
The film not only shows its modest origins, but the frustration of its maker.
With The Intruder, Claire Denis’s evolution from narrative cogency toward a more elusively trance-like aesthetic reaches a mesmeric apex.
There are several good reasons why Peter Jackson should not have remade the 1933 classic tale of beauty and the beast.
The films of Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and Hope and Crosby all worked the same territory, ZAZ just took it as far as it would go without snapping.
It’s so contrived and smugly pleased with its own tolerant attitudes that it comes off as a rank slice of Christmas cheese.
It’s hard to envision a worse big-budget film version of Mel Brooks’s Tony Award-winning musical The Producers than this dreadfully lifeless affair.
There are two sides to every story, the saying goes, but in this super-Rashomon-meets-Shrek CGI contraption there are no less than five.
Woody Allen has been playing a joke on us all these years and in his new film Match Point he finally cops to it.
It’s difficult to fault a film that scrutinizes the veracity of childhood with such clarity.
Loving Couples executes subversive surgery on oppressive social orders only to switch to the more comfy affirmation that the universe belongs to mothers.
Theo Angelopoulos’s compositions modulate from lyrical to brutal.
Rob Marshall doesn’t hype the soul of Japan, only its artifice.
It focuses less on the ever-present and distracting bibilical allegory and more on its magic-and-monsters fantasy.
There’s no moment during this true-life Little Codger That Could tale that doesn’t drip with unabashedly calculated schmaltz.