The film traces, to cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.
A few too many on-the-nose needle drops make Beautiful Boy play like a schmaltz-infused music-video-cum-alarmist-anti-drug-PSA.
The film’s sense of nostalgia is ultimately a reflection of how little the film asks of its audience.
Its clunky incidents of exposition leave us with no real understanding of what anyone is thinking or feeling.
It’s a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson’s sly intuition.
Joachim Trier’s film is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.
A grippingly expressive espionage yarn, another exemplary entry in Spielberg’s late-career period, receives a top-tier, must-buy transfer.
Jared and Jerusha Hess remain committed to clotting up the screen with ostensibly charming “eccentricity.”
The wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments are undermined by a frenzy of chaotic excess.
Only rarely does Steven Spielberg observe how queasily at odds our patriotism is with our humanity.
The film's Hollywood skewering is constantly spoon-feed to us like strained bananas.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s anti-critic harangue is petty coming from a writer-director whose spotty filmography has largely been met with critical praise.
Atom Egoyan’s hypocritical prestige-movie skittishness is more offensive than ordinary sensationalism.
Drake Doremus’s film is an inert, thinly plotted melodrama premised on trite characterizations that would be offensive if they weren’t so absurd.
This almost weirdly resonant Stallone vehicle nets an attractive transfer that should please hardcore action fans and genre tourists alike.
The film preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.
Stacie Passon approaches Concussion’s subject matter provocatively though never exploitatively.
Win Win’s best qualities are of the kind that tend to go unnoticed.
The film just barely balances its everyone-learns-something uplift with ragged emotional dynamics and unexpected humor.
And so it is that Oscar bloggers, seeking to itch the scratch Leo’s blatant assertion that campaigning, not prognosticating, is what wins Oscars, have collectively shifted the balance of power back to the plucky 14-year-old girl who tore through every scene (every. scene.)