The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
What lingers most readily from Amsterdam are the little privileged moments.
Across Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.
James Mangold’s film mostly plays to nostalgic reveries of the auto industry’s golden age.
That Christian Bale packs it on and sheds it off with the change of seasons has become the essence of his thespian identity.
Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.
While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.
Three years after he hit paydirt and a bonanza of critical acclaim for The Big Short, Adam McKay is back with Vice.
Scott Cooper’s film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.
The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.
The inclusion of each cut of The New World marks this as the definitive home-video edition of Malick’s greatest film.
The film has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.
You have to ask which storyline does an evenly matched Oscar contest best serve? That of the underdog, obviously.
Terrence Malick’s juxtaposition of the beautiful and grotesque captures life as a Felliniesque carnival, at once sad and life-affirming.
The film’s fourth-wall-breaking wags a finger at the perceived facile nature of celebrity-driven mass culture even as it ultimately condescends to audiences.
With Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick achieves the sense of stylistic ossification that many accused his last feature, To the Wonder, of embodying.
It doesn’t take long to realize that Ridley Scott’s adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.
Adam West and Burt Ward are antipodal to every subsequent incarnation of Batman and Robin. The dynamic duo are blithe fuddy duddies turned billionaire scions in spandex.
Burton puts more of a premium on sound and image to suggest character depths than the more prosaic Christopher Nolan does.
If this year’s Best Actor race is all about which nominee brandishes the most compelling story, then Christian Bale faces some mighty long odds.