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.)
An okay presentation of an actor’s workshop masquerading as a movie.
These episodes are mini-dramas that could work on any theatrical stage and yet there’s nothing theatrical about the way they’re presented here.
It’s not hard to see what attracted Philip Seymour Hoffman to Bob Gluadini’s 2007 play.
When it comes to modern action directors uninterested in spatial lucidity, Paul Greengrass has gotten off pretty easy.
The film dissolves into an amorphous, uncertain haze out of which, finally, it can’t see its way out.
Bob Funk is in drastic need of a cinematic shock at 24 frames per second.
It’s a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout.
Changeling announces itself as an autopsy of an expansive body of lies that it never actually performs.
When scrutinizing this race, pundits rarely discuss precedent.
The Wire has never reduced its stories to a soundbite and this season is no different.
Ruby Dee may be the only one that generates honest goodwill with a titanic slap worthy of the category’s “season vet” slot.
Steve Carell’s pursed-lipped awkwardness and sweet buffoonery aren’t enough to salvage this incorrigibly hackneyed film.
People aren’t who they seem in Gone Baby Gone, and that goes for its makers as well.
Like Michael, Detective Lester Freamon bumps up against the larger forces of an organization.
Dumped by its original distributor because of its title, Albert Brooks’s film should, instead, have been ditched for not being very funny.
Bennett Miller’s film has an axe to grind against its subject, the quite horrible but quite gifted writer Truman Capote.
A hugely ambitious and hugely successful crime epic whose plot tentacles just keep on spreading, wonderfully so.
Any initial sense of intimacy or empathy is quickly subsumed by and abandoned for a cool intellectual distance.