Hustle doesn’t seem to know how its characters fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.
The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.
The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.
The sobriety of its vision serves as a conscious respite from the hyperbolic hate machine of modern American culture.
Scott Cooper’s film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.
Ron Howard’s adaptation retains the essential inanity of author Dan Brown’s source material.
The stark atmosphere and the intimate focus on character drama keeps the action on a muted emotional keel.
Round and round Gillian Anderson’s Blanche DuBois goes, and where she stops, everyone knows.
The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it’s ultimately just as hollow.
It boasts a Greatest Generation nostalgia so thoroughgoing it might as well be called Boys Becoming Men.
Like his prior The Kingdom, Peter Berg’s film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
An overmatched star and a scarcity of eccentricity sink this hip-lit origin story from director John Krokidas.
The film’s highly calculated beauty suffocates rather than elevates the story’s emotional underpinnings.
Lyle Kessler’s Orphans has got some major daddy issues.
The film is a smartly written, deeply engaging portrait of a movement just about to begin.
Since desire is the theme on the table, let’s just say that what’s finally wanted is a much better film.
Is Fernando Meirelles out of touch, or is he a savvy resurrectionist with fresh tricks up his sleeve?
The film is deliberately withholding, never giving us quite enough to connect to its characters and their situation.
If ingeniousness is a foreign concept to Contraband, so too are time and space.
If Robert Altman had made a cop drama, it might have looked and sounded like Rampart.