In its messy unreality, the film finds something profoundly simple in the trivial.
The film somehow shows its hand too early and plays its cards too close to its chest.
The show’s alien ecosystem is often far stranger than anything in its characters’ heads.
The series is patient enough to let us understand its central character’s trauma, but it doesn’t make us to wallow in it.
Like all Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.
In its fourth season, the series struggles to regain its footing, but the latter half provides satisfying narrative closure.
Season three rivals its predecessors in its intoxicating blend of bleak cynicism and irreverent comedy.
The series is decidedly unambitious and ends before it ever really gets off the ground.
Its themes are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
With this fractured story of singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, Ethan Hawke battles the clichés of the musical biopic.
The film renders a vivid world of drunks and schemers who live marginally on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
It’s an earnest, genuine attempt to show the familiar hardships of a relationship, specifically one between two women.
Season two wastes no time reminding us that the show’s self-centered Brooklynites have blood on their hands.
It combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama.
The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.
The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva’s cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.
Like Cake, Meadowland takes a slow, painfully close look at the effects of a parent losing a child.
Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries occupies a sweet spot between the self-aware and taut.
Cherien Dabis is least successful at connecting her character May’s marital crisis to the rumblings of her repressed heritage.