Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.
Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
Despite the sordid, festering material that the series explores, what ultimately emerges is sheer beauty.
It’s most crucial shortcoming is its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.
The film’s crucial shortcoming is its failure to illuminate both the inner life and artistic genius of Django Reinhardt.
Catherine Corsini depicts feminists in lighthearted ways, at once humorously caricatured and sensitively human.
Cédric Klapisch’s film becomes an effervescent variation on the time-honored story of striking out for the American dream.
Eric Rochant avoids the pompously eassayistic over-complication that typifies globetrotting political porn such as Syriana.
The Kid with a Bike reconfirms Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s reputation as masters of the modern class drama.
Cyril’s story is a tragically real one with symbolic overtones, and it’s one that’s brought to painfully wrenching life.
The film locates the dark enchantment in characters discovering themselves during their most despairing moments.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are modern cinema’s poets laureate of working-class marginalization and spiritual crises.
Stylistically, The Kid with a Bike is one of the Dardennes’ most fluid films.
The film is either an insane, almost entirely unquestioning celebration of all crime movie clichés or a chilling subversion of them.
This trifurcated tale of death, grief, and the great beyond that finds Clint Eastwood succumbing to eye-rolling corniness.
Vincent Cassel deserves better scenery to devour.
It would be hard to imagine a less necessary Holocaust picture than A Secret.
The film adds up to nothing more than an innocuous paint-by-numbers lesson about embracing opportunities and enjoying life to its fullest.
Cédric Klapisch’s shallow stylistic ticks preclude identifiable emotional or behavioral reality.
I suppose it could be worse. I mean, seriously, who would you rather go around the world with in 80 days: Jackie Chan or Hilary Duff?