The film’s threads of personal loss and cultural friction are all but lost amid the tawdry romantic entanglements.
All the palace intrigue and endless backstabbing in Mary Queen of Scots feels at once overly familiar and underdeveloped.
Jonathan Mostow luxuriates in the pure surface pleasures of the his many taut, formally dynamic action sequences.
Charting the divide between the haves and have-nots in a Swiss mountain town, Sister imagines the two as existing in fantastically separate spheres.
Sister is another meditation on the viewpoint of children in an alienating adult world.
Berlinale, the most smoothly run of all major festivals, is a pleasure for the Anglophone.
The film's almost manic dependence on story twists pushes the obsessive-compulsive contortions of character and plot to a whole new level.
The film has enough of the crudely exploitative to make it feel like a decisively unwholesome entertainment.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed initially coasts on its intriguing setup but quickly unravels in the second half.
By limiting our entry into its protagonist’s headspace, Red Road feels disingenuously committed to sympathetically portraying her situation.
With Olmi, Kiarostami, and Loach aboard, this is a train certainly worth hopping.
Tickets offers a triptych of slender yet genuine delights.
The contest between one’s desire to flee home and the attraction to the formative people and places of one’s youth forms the crux of the film.
It’s movies like Sweet Sixteen that keep us honest.