This adaptation of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is equal parts unwieldy and ambitious.
The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.
The film could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.
The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.
Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.
Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.
As it proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn’t much beyond the window dressing.
When its tone slides firmly back into the murk, it’s hard not to see DC’s notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.
Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.
Wonder Woman’s Diana is ultimately an idealized abstraction more than a fully rounded character.
The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.
Whereas female sexuality was borderline vampiric in Antichrist, this time we’re in more ambiguous, contextually richer terrain.
McG’s technical skill can’t quite overcome the story’s lazy sense of humor and incomprehensible plotting.
Its knack for extracting quiet beauty from all the mayhem lends Boss’s best scenes the precision and artistry of a monstrous ballet.
Visually glassy and smooth, Perfect Sense values the dynamic mood of each scene without being overly stylized.
Battle to Seattle is Stuart Townsend’s attempt to fashion a modern-day Medium Cool.
Intertwined storylines vainly strive to convey the complexities of the Iraq War in Philip Haas’s The Situation.
Is Mission to Mars an auteurist litmus test for the Y2K generation?
The Ice Harvest proves that modest, workmanlike film noir need not be accompanied by hipster homages and ironic self-consciousness.
John Dahl’s dust-collecting WWII chronicle The Great Raid finally arrives with the dull thud of a bomb that fails to detonate on impact.