Ke Huy Quan proves his winning hand by holding out hope through his character’s pain.
Martin McDonagh’s film is a mordantly funny dark fable about men’s inability to work together for the betterment of society.
Doug Liman’s sci-fi action thriller remains one of the most enjoyable American blockbusters of the previous decade.
What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other.
Only Marisa Tomei’s face can compete with Huppert’s ability to turn even the sappiest of scenarios into a nuanced tour de force.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a silly, mood-shifting shaggy-dog anthology that feels at once structurally ambitious and almost perfunctory.
Paddington 2 arrives on home video ready for canonization as a new family-friendly classic.
Paul King’s Paddington 2 profoundly believes in the harmonizing power of warmth, politeness, and the absurd.
The efforts of a slumming cast dwarfed by clichés and opportunistically scattershot class pity.
Live by Night adds a new wrinkle to the well-traveled terrain of the mafia film: the woke gangster.
The film attempts a tone of tragic understatement that registers instead as flat, plodding, and underfelt.
It ends up with blurry action that often looks digitally faked and a fractious plot that’s stuck over-explaining itself.
After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.
The narrative is helplessly adrift, a yarn that extols vague grit and determination with no discernible through line.
The film’s episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.
Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film’s folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.
We hope to shine a little light on brilliant, touching, often funny performances which enrich our understanding of what it means to be human.
In the wake of the ostentatious atmospherics summoned by the likes of Shutter Island and American Horror Story: Asylum, the film feels unnecessarily restrained.
It’s an intelligent, self-reflexive summer blockbuster with an eye for castigating proliferate franchise mentalities.
One may feel mildly insulted by the presumptuous attitude the film seems to choose as it sends us on our way.