Hugo’s celebration of Méliès doesn’t celebrate form. Rather, it celebrates celebration.
The film renders Dalí’s final years with a self-negating blend of pity and devotion.
Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.
The film evinces neither the visceral pleasures of noir nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances.
The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.
The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.
One may wonder whether Per Fly would have been better served by making a documentary about the oil-for-food scandal.
Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.
This is a cerebral, 25-year-old film that follows the blueprint for today’s endless glut of superhero movies.
Writer-director David Michôd’s film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.
More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.
It’s difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley’s hammy theatrics.
Disney’s exceptional, gorgeous update of Rudyard Kipling’s adventure classic is one of the studio’s best films in a generation.
Jon Favreau doesn’t know how to fit the material’s familiar elements into his own coherent vision.
In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible.
Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.
A relentless stream of twists and turns that exude neither imagination in their craftsmanship nor moral revulsion in their implications.
This third and supposedly final edition in the franchise is nothing more than an uncomfortably transparent contractual obligation.
It doesn’t take long to realize that Ridley Scott’s adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.
In the wake of the ostentatious atmospherics summoned by the likes of Shutter Island and American Horror Story: Asylum, the film feels unnecessarily restrained.