The film is Guillermo del Toro’s fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.
The film goes in for the idea of texture, tics, and human behavior, but there’s no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.
J.C. Chandor’s fondness for situational irony is empowered by the spartan efficiency of his method, and that of most of his performers.
If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the verities of life, this film is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger’s family album.
Liv Ullmann’s film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play’s guessing-game quality on screen without copping to reductivism.
Christopher Nolan’s goal seems to be to take the humor and wildness out of imagination, to see invention in rigidly practical and scientific terms.
A new element in Look of Silence is the view it offers of those who knew murdered victims or who managed to escape death.
The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
Estelle Parsons has always found something interesting to do.
The more movies he makes, the more Paul Greengrass’s have-it-both-ways m.o. as a filmmaker becomes clearer.
If you’ve followed the Up documentary series, you know that it catches up with a cross-section of Britishers every seven years.
The film confidently and forcefully storms onto DVD with an admirable A/V transfer, only hindered by a paltry gathering of extras.
Jennifer Lawrence is taking a page from Mo’Nique’s book and playing the campaign game by her own rules.
The only craft behind the Andy Muschietti film’s scares are their decibel levels.
Compared to most of the season’s races, Best Actress has remained somewhat open.
Any major-race hopes that Focus Features may have had for the film were basically dashed this week.
Zero Dark Thirty is nothing if not a forthright, above-board, cards-on-the-table kind of film.
Consider Bigelow a virtual lock, tightening up the Best Director field alongside Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Ben Affleck, and, perhaps, Tom Hooper or David O. Russell.
Lawless is a compellingly nutty and uneven gangster film.
What remains in the air is just how many plays the David O. Russell film can pull off.