Scott Hicks’s largely unsteady grip on the story derails the film from its initial path of depicting genuine anguish.
The audience will very much slog through the laborious twists of Tony Gilroy’s ultimately routine, money-stakes-only espionage caper.
Even completists of director Tom Tykwer will write this shoddy film off like so much bad debt.
The way Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells it, the Spanish Armada’s defeat by the British Empire was the orgasm The Virgin Queen never had.
The film is an eye-popping pageant parade masquerading as rapturous religious art.
Getting worked up over Shoot ‘Em Up’s excessive bloodshed is playing right into its hands.
By the year 2027, Children of Men’s cult status will be more apparent than ozone.
These films are not in production, except in my imagination.
The problem with Children of Men is that it’s too much of a performance and not enough of a movie.
It would be foolish to deny the supreme technical achievements of Children of Men.
Cuarón’s virtuostic vision is laced with magical-realist touches and reflective of the constant flux that is the bane of so many refugee and immigrant lives.
Imagine a heist film cast by the Rainbow Coalition and you have some idea of what Spike Lee does with Inside Man.
Derailed has its suspenseful locomotive force disrupted by the clumsy plotting of Stuart Beattie’s script.
Fans of the film may want to save their allowance money and wait for the inevitable two-disc edition.
If Sin City’s construction is wholly self-aware, its deliberately affected performances wisely forgo winks to their own outlandishness.
I can’t take my eyes off of you? Au contraire.
A work of MTV-styled historical projection, King Arthur allows Guinevere to kick considerable ass-pity the film can’t do the same.
Mike Hodges’s sleek, bleak film may be the year’s nastiest noir, but its low profile won’t improve via Paramount’s perfunctory DVD.
With its pretty close-ups of pretty actors and pretty slow-motion shots set to pretty songs, Closer settles for preciousness.
In film noir, you’re doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t.