Villeneuve’s film is a milestone of precision craftsmanship on a gargantuan scale.
Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.
The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.
David Cronenberg stares upon humanity’s need to evolve toward some kind of survival with a serene, godlike assurance.
With his Deception, Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film inadvertently confirms that Bond is best when the simpler, more savage pleasures prevail.
France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as as symbolic of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.
Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
Anderson’s latest is described as a “love letter to journalists.”
Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.
Many of the selections at this year’s festival were genre films, or, at least, exhibited notable genre-adjacent elements.
In Zoe, you see the honeymoon phase but not the emotional intimacy that makes a relationship last.
Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.
Benoît Jacquot’s treatment of the text is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.
Dolan adapts a talky play into something that could feasibly have the same emotional effect as a silent film.
Celestine’s submission to an evil and violent man becomes an eloquent indictment of a nation’s anti-Semitism.
A beautiful presentation of a film that merges the tropes of the 007 series with a startlingly expressive aesthetic.
There’s much to admire here, from its symbolically sickly aesthetic to its clearly shot action sequences.
As intelligent, often hilarious, and occasionally insightful as it is, it aslo shows a filmmaker’s style hardening into shtick.
Lanthimos’s films live and die by their concepts—or gimmicks, depending on your outlook.