Joel Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.
In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.
Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.
Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.
The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson’s playful, childlike naïveté.
The premise is undermined by the film’s tendency to soft-pedal the dangerous situations it sets up.
The chickens of gilded-era capitalism come to roost in as many configurations as are possible.
Just how soap-operatic are Soderbergh and writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler willing to go?
This episode sees its characters ground up especially in the gears of their own patriarchal systems.
Visually, the episode’s centerpiece is the Knick’s much-alluded-to charity ball, played at once as a sprawling comedy of manners and a jawdropping pictorial spectacle.
The Knick’s second season has seen Soderbergh turn his camera on different strains of pedagogy afforded by the turn-of-the-century milieu.
Steven Soderbergh’s camera seamlessly stitches the hospital’s constituent parts together in what appears to be real time.
“Wonderful Surprises” is so over-stacked as to make each scene work purely as exposition.
A clear effort is being made by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, and Steven Soderbergh to make the new season as dense as possible.
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.
One of the most exciting new shows on television, and HBO’s Blu-ray captures its exceptional visual and audio design with near-perfection.
A macho celebration of fighting for “freedom” because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the irony of that ideology.
As immersive as it is overstuffed, The Knick’s season finale opens on the anxious face of the hospital’s secretly pregnant benefactor.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s gift for unfussily blocking The Knick’s scenes is made awesomely apparent in the opening.
