The show’s temporal structure deftly elucidates the devastating legacy of the cult at its center.
The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.
Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.
In Zoe, you see the honeymoon phase but not the emotional intimacy that makes a relationship last.
David F. Sandberg’s Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.
Simon Stone’s film too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.
The season finale of Homeland lingers almost uncomfortably long on the survivors.
Homeland should talk less, and trust that intimate scenes will serve to demonstrate or explain the larger themes.
Homeland falters when it focuses on the contrivances of its big-picture plotting, but they lead “New Normal” to a powerful ending.
The episode closes with Carrie finally making the connection that Allison so desperately sought to cover up.
Homeland is too wrapped up in its own allure to deliver on the story it started to tell in previous weeks.
“Why Is This Night Different?” feels like an overly complicated table-setting episode, especially given the way Homeland merges its other two subplots.
Carrie’s been alone this whole season, and both literally and figuratively, has no super power to fall back on.
Homeland is firing on all cylinders when it focuses on what all of this endless terrorism means to the individual players, particularly Carrie.
Homeland is best when both sides are nuanced and evenly matched, and even better when the two are dangerously overlapping.
Like the excellent fourth season of Homeland, season five suggests a politically wise and deeply skeptical update of John le Carré‘s very best spy-centric work.
If there’s any ambiguity to be found in the film’s prolonged last gasps, it’s of a mawkish and unpalatable variety.
Bruno Barreto’s insistence that this pass for a product that Hollywood might have spawned smoothens a journey built on sharp edges.
Each of these moments illustrates a slightly different shade of the films’ fluid realization of a complex visual, thematic, and emotional spectrum.
An insurmountable amount of extras comes second only to New Line’s stunning visual and audio transfer of Peter Jackson’s exhilarating and exhausting epic.