For a while, the performances are nuanced enough to distract from the film’s implausibilities.
In this film, nuance seems to have disapparated from the wizarding world altogether.
It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.
Redmayne discusses everything from calibrating his physicality in rehearsals to cultivating his imagination on a barren set.
As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.
The fun but more predictable Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald moves the new series forward, but only incrementally.
Judging from the sequel’s first trailer, we are in perhaps for a darker experience.
Nick Park’s talents often serve only to highlight the fundamental lack of inspiration at Early Man’s core.
The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.
Leonardo DiCaprio will win an Oscar because “being right” is the modus operandi of the average pundit’s investment in any given year’s Oscar race.
One doesn’t doubt the filmmakers’ empathy for Lili even as one questions its sentimentality.
First, praise be to the brave Oscar pundits who have Bradley Cooper in their crosshairs.
Inventive in its visual effects, but it’s a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum embedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.
Meticulous in its adherence to conventional narrative inducement, it only offers a sanded-down and embossed vision of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde’s 30-year marriage.
With all due respect to the gentlemen in contention, this year’s likely Supporting Actor crop has shaped up to be a snooze.
Everything in the film, songs included, is cranked to 11, the melodrama of it all soaring.
It doesn’t take long to gather the influences trickling through Derick Martini’s Hick.
The most interesting questions are left unanswered, if they’re even asked.
Only the star performances in My Week with Marilyn, cartoonish as they are, make seeing the film worth the effort.
Grim aesthetics and an even grimmer worldview define Christopher Smith’s 14th-century period piece.