Its depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
The chickens of gilded-era capitalism come to roost in as many configurations as are possible.
The Knick’s second season has seen Soderbergh turn his camera on different strains of pedagogy afforded by the turn-of-the-century milieu.
“Wonderful Surprises” is so over-stacked as to make each scene work purely as exposition.
The Knick is such a well-constructed series that the characters’ dialogue can’t help but reveal one prejudice thrown at the expense of another
It’s hard to avoid feeling like the same issues of dramatic proportion and temporal flow that dogged the first season remain.
The Knick provides a wealth of nuanced history of early 20th-century medicine and social mores.
As immersive as it is overstuffed, The Knick’s season finale opens on the anxious face of the hospital’s secretly pregnant benefactor.
The change in seasons is a terrifically smart maneuver, even if it allows for some fairly obvious hopscotching.
“Get the Rope” may mark the first time Soderbergh’s dazzling, inventive shooting style just can’t support the dramaturgy.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s handling of the meningitis case is both technically and dramatically virtuoso.
The Knickerbocker Hospital’s putative mission to help New York City’s neediest gets its most interesting stress test yet in “They Capture the Heat.”
The lurking anti-subtlety of The Knick’s pilot picks right back up in “Mr. Paris Shoes.”
It treats its characters as placeholders for philosophical arguments and spends the majority of its running time trying to “solve” existential mysteries without adequately exploring them.
Jack and Diane’s love story is about as illuminating as the story’s cryptic reliance on metaphor.
The film thrives on a diet of meaty, recognizable dramatic material.
As a film partly about the care of a dementia-addled senior citizen, The Savages naturally invites comparisons to Away From Her—all of them unflattering.
This smirky ask-nothing account of Bettie Page’s life won’t give anyone a rise, good or bad.
Resisting the conventions of the traditional biopic at every turn, the film never finds its footing as a story.
It’s bad from beginning to end, and like Jake, it’s totally full of itself.