Tension becomes Caitlin Cronenberg’s film. The release of it, not so much.
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.
Aeon Flux assumes an anti-establishment sci-fi façade in order to promote alarmist slippery-slope anti-science attitudes.
Adam Goldberg’s film is a meandering cautionary tale about a frazzled actor’s steep plunge into madness..
Apart from You is finally all frustrated anticipation, nowhere more evident than in the climactic train station farewell.
In essence, Robert Lepage has remade 2001: A Space Odyssey without the Kubrick film’s sense of spiritual wonder and elation.
The Tales of Hoffmann looks magnificent, but it’s ultimately just eye candy for aesthetes.
Its main character may renounce California glitter for a down-home family life in Jersey, but Just Friends is as Hollywood as they come.
Right now, Raja Gosnell’s career is the bane of most sensible parents’ multiplex existence.
Throughout, Carlos Reygadas likens our disgust for his nonchalant sex scenes as a form of political reticence.
The film film vividly captures the disenfranchisement and emotional and intellectual inhibition fostered by poverty in both kids and parental adults.
Both Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend are so committed to their roles that their friendship in the film almost seems credible.
Syriana may seem like a treatise on the corruption within the global oil industry, but it’s actually an overstuffed memo.
The film comes off like a cursory sketch rather than a full-bodied portrait.
Virtually no musical number transpires without an array of swirling indifference, undermining a lot of the drama.
This grand film shares with Five Dolls for an August Moon and Bay of Blood a crystallization of Mario Bava’s worldview.
Traveling Actors remains Mikio Naruse’s out-and-out funniest work, a comedy of numerous surface pleasures that unexpectedly deepens in retrospect.
The Ice Harvest proves that modest, workmanlike film noir need not be accompanied by hipster homages and ironic self-consciousness.
Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said Roger Vadim was “with it.”
The film’s stylistic crudities explicitly illustrate what, in Mikio Naruse’s later work, is relegated to subtlety and subtext.