Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.
Behind the film’s self-awareness and irony is a hollow emotional core.
The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What’s the point of these fussy allusions?
Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.
What works about the film can largely be attributed to Tracy Letts’s original text.
Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it’s like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one’s home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats.
The relative quality of generational family abuse, a prominent motif in the play, comes through loud and clear.
The poster for August: Osage County would have been an event no matter what it looked like.
Brad Anderson’s film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
It’s nothing but amusement in the Poster Lab today, folks.
That the Best Picture category’s “Will it be six or will it be seven?” question was settled as close to 10 as possible without actually being 10 isn’t merely a mark of how much of a mess this year’s Oscars are.
The film is a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought.
Rango receives an excellent audio/visual treatment and some solid extras from Paramount.
Despite its panoply of clichés, the film does work up some goodwill once you accept it on its almost defiantly generic, low-stakes terms.
Rango turns an assembly line of classic western themes and iconography into a bustlingly fresh genre ecosystem.
It’s awfully hard not to feel like you’re missing something throughout this Miracle Worker.
Call it Land of the Dull.
It suffers from sheer sloppiness of script that results in scenes of comedic frivolity coming off as screechingly forced.
Kit Kittredge is remarkable for the social consciousness its young characters evince.