The film lacks for the empathy, curiosity, and sense of humor that are the defining characteristics of the Smiths’s music.
The series invigorates its material with the rousing trappings of a semi-comedic western.
The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.
The film is a hokily melodramatic rise-fall-redemption story with a mostly unearned patina of greater significance.
Criterion showcases Linklater’s longitudinal masterwork with a gorgeous HD transfer and an entire second Blu-ray’s worth of supplements.
Linklater’s film is an experiment in time, and one that’s attentive to the audience’s sense of empathy.
Not since Robert Altman’s Nashville has an American film felt as real as life itself.