Thoroughbreds is a film about the disastrous perils of too little empathy, but it never evinces much of its own.
It grapples with emotional enigma of infatuation, and the question of how such a mighty force can also be so fleeting.
The film successfully argues that it’s through sensory details that we access the deeper aspects of our lives.
Gabe Klinger’s Porto is less of a city symphony than a muted impressionist painting of urban drifting.
The film emphasizes its heroes’ inter-personal dynamics, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.
The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.
Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn’t manufactured.
It alternates awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.
Like Cake, Meadowland takes a slow, painfully close look at the effects of a parent losing a child.
Ironically, the mildness of writer-director Victor Levin’s film turns out to be its most engaging quality.
The material, convoluted even by Shakespeare’s narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.
Paul Schrader’s personality reveals itself in the film’s joylessness, which is meaningless without his occasionally poignant existentialism.
It unnecessarily hampers itself for over an hour for the sake of a gotcha moment before finally allowing its actors to explore something more than generic grief.
Sony’s Blu-ray may be light on extras, but the charms of Jarmusch’s funny, sexy, and elegiac vampire movie speak for themselves.
the black void of death is the darkness du jour in Abrams’s bracingly revisionist melodramedy.
Raja Gosnell’s particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.
The clarity and inventiveness of J.J. Abrams’s direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.
The story arc is somewhat facile, and its lesson about preserving history instead of demolishing it to make way for new, shiny things is too obvious.
The film is wholly dependent on the charisma and chemistry of its voice talents to carry us through the 88-minute running time.
Lots of folks go missing in the movies, and some of the most memorable are right here in this list.