The xenophobic subtext of the prior films in the Kingsman series is text in Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man.
Mank’s most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.
The series homes in on the growing chasm between royal expectations and public norms.
The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.
Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn.
David Fincher’s film maintains a consistently bleak atmosphere that elevates it above its sloppy sequel.
When it’s good, director Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.
It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.
The juxtaposition of courtship and violence is the film’s one true coup, but it still mistakes weaponry for agency.
Once upon a time, two girls walk through a forest, muddying up their fancy clothes in search of a fortune-telling witch.
The film evades all but the most careful commonplaces about the relationship between the viewer and art.
The film refuses to penetrate Turing’s carnality and allow Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man’s sexuality.
The story wouldn’t be out of place on Game of Thrones, except it lacks for the HBO program’s dense and surprising dramatic reflexes.
Game of Thrones tends to peak with its penultimate episode, leaving finales open to operate as a form of self-summary.
The episode’s saving grace lies in the contrast that the series continues to develop between the two young women of the Stark family.
The unifying element of “The Laws of God and Men” may be the profound silence of the show’s architecture.
Only Michelle MacLaren’s brilliantly composed coda with the White Walkers sticks in the memory.
The Sansa/Cersei contrast sets the tone of the episode, which focuses on women more than any other hour of the series to date.
The inter-scene cutting here slightly lingers on every place the camera visits, now searching for someone who appears to know where to go next.
Game of Thrones finally feels liberated from its own extensive mythology and now moves with thrilling fury and purpose.