Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.
Though it needlessly withholds certain details for dramatic effect, the film resists embellishment or caricature.
The film is too irreverent in tone and narrow in scope to place Roger Ailes’s criminality in a larger, more meaningful context.
Throughout, the film tirelessly hammers home the point of being true to yourself.
In the end, the filmmakers settle for stigmatizing victimhood, abusing Sue Ann almost as much as her former tormentors.
The tea leaves tell us that this is a more unpredictable Oscar race than most people are perhaps willing to admit.
I, Tonya’s attempts to implicate viewers is its broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.
The Girl on the Train arrives on Blu-ray in a serviceable, if unremarkable, packaging from Universal.
Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train is a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.
Tim Burton’s direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.
Facts about each character are dutifully punched out, in earnest speeches or actions that are wildly overdrawn.
The film follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.
It’s the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy’s performance that anchors the film’s many winning blind-alley gags.
The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.
The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.
Its second season is no more or less disappointing than a grand seduction that concludes with a minute-long roll in the hay.
The film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the antiheroine’s bratty passivity.
Almost none of the film’s characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg’s bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.
The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.
The film spent roughly a dozen years in development, and unfortunately it shows.