The film is, even by Paul Schrader’s standards, a bleak endeavor, concerned with the durability of spirituality.
Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing us to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.
The cinematic touchstone throughout Schrader’s First Reformed is the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer.
The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson’s playful, childlike naïveté.
Maud Lewis herself couldn’t paint a hurricane that would blow the film’s overburdened narrative off course.
Linklater’s The Before Trilogy receive stunning 2K transfers and a comprehensive compilation of bonus materials from Criterion.
The film conveys a sense of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.
Criterion showcases Linklater’s longitudinal masterwork with a gorgeous HD transfer and an entire second Blu-ray’s worth of supplements.
The film never surrenders to the abandon of its action, and as such never feels like it shifts out of first gear.
The documentary is just more of what we’ve come to expect from director Richard Linklater’s expanded fanverse.
The film shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.
Ti West’s methodical austerity yields in this film the most powerful passages of his career.
The film touches on the effects of a culture that puts too much emphasis on winning and money at the expense of simple healthy competition.
Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.
It spends a lot of time considering the fear of knowing, which may explain why Alejandro Amenábar didn’t seem to know what kind of film he was making.
Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast’s divergent styles.
Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another “growing up is hard” dot on the grid.
Andrew Niccol has awkwardly shoehorned in broad talking points from various sides of the drone controversy.
Niccol has awkwardly shoehorned in broad talking points from various sides of the drone controversy.
Ethan Hawke’s concentration on Bernstein isn’t a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but an attempt to have a soul-bearing conversation.