A few too many on-the-nose needle drops make Beautiful Boy play like a schmaltz-infused music-video-cum-alarmist-anti-drug-PSA.
A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, the film is ultimately a failed act of empathy.
The film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.
Economical storytelling and an admirable sense of invention power Marcus Dunstan’s oddly welcome sequel to The Collector.
There’s something a little false in the film’s sense of play.
This is the bleak, crazy, postmodern superhero saga that Kick-Ass aspired to be, which doesn’t prevent it from being sluggish, derivative, and beyond obvious.
The film depicts, sans nuance or insight, the collapse of a tech firm during the dot-com era.
The Wire has never reduced its stories to a soundbite and this season is no different.
The Wire’s landscape is thick with men almost desperate to reach back and snatch some kid from the vortex.
Carver is one several cops and ex-cops taking an extracurricular interest in individual kids on the street.
“Change the course” often means more of the same, only more of it.
The cat-and-mouse isn’t much of a contest at this point.
The dealers know the kids, and the kids know the cops.
Its opening credits are not an ordinary credits sequence, but a series of four short films that distill each season’s themes, goals, and motifs.
Marlo Stanfield has maneuvered to the top of the West Baltimore drug trade, and he’s executing a broad campaign to stay there.
The slippery slope of civilization is already in place on The Wire and Simon is just out to document how each and every person survives.
In such a world as the one depicted on the show, there is little place for someone like Bubbles.
A hugely ambitious and hugely successful crime epic whose plot tentacles just keep on spreading, wonderfully so.
The best crime show out there, deserving of any and all hype.