The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.
The film has the feel of a mea culpa from Gainsbourg for having taken Birkin for granted.
The film leaves the viewer with the impression of a man trying to beat the entropic decay that surrounds him to the punch.
The quality and scope of this set makes it one of the most impressive home-video releases of all time.
There’s a lot of sexual violence in the film, but it scans as unimaginatively repulsive and blatantly misogynistic.
The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.
Ismael’s Ghosts simultaneously collapses and expands Arnaud Desplechin’s entire body of work.
Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts is a lucid, free-form sprawl of stories nested within stories.
Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman’s rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.
Independence Day: Resurgence does nothing satiric or fleetingly parodic with the notion of a world united in the midst of alien annihilation.
Agnès Varda’s 1988 features are two of her most evocative, and provocative, films.
The premise should be prime fodder for director Wim Wenders’s brand of poetic regret.
At times, The Witch’s minimalist chill becomes too diffuse for its own good.
Even as Samba struggles to hold onto his identity, the film becomes entangled in an identity crisis of its own.
Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.
The film is only slightly dependent on the self-pity that informed Asia Argento’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it feels similarly airless.
The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.
Whereas female sexuality was borderline vampiric in Antichrist, this time we’re in more ambiguous, contextually richer terrain.
Lars von Trier’s pretenses of self-interrogation and cross-examination avail themselves as especially useful when considering his work.