Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.
The series is at its strongest when using dissonance to reorient our understanding of loss.
With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.
The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.
Peter Farrelly respects the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship.
A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller.
The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.
Director Will Raee’s film takes its cue from the Toddlers & Tiaras school of reality TV child exploitation.
Michael Keaton’s powerful performance in John Lee Hancock’s The Founder is marooned in a wishy-washy story.
The dialogue is at once easygoing in its candor and rigidly on-message about the corrosive nature of lies.
Third time’s the charm for Shout! Factory, whose new Blu-ray box set marks the show’s most definitive home-video release yet.
It becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with Ferrell’s tantrum-prone man-child.
It rejects a fawning (or even particularly detailed) account of mental illness in favor of a plunge into the deep end of a bottomless ego.
Even the historical events in Mad Men are part of its empty surrealism.
Even though the series periodically employs less than imaginative plotting, there’s something to be said about its perplexing watchability.
It’s when the film falls back on the most familiar tropes that it runs into the most trouble.
This is the bleak, crazy, postmodern superhero saga that Kick-Ass aspired to be, which doesn’t prevent it from being sluggish, derivative, and beyond obvious.
The film has none of its spiritual predecessors’ wit, verve, or morally conflicted perspective on its subjects.
Radical conformity is always lampoon-worthy, no matter the setting.
Look for a third DVD in eight months with a scratch-and-sniff case made out of Jack Twist’s denim shirt.