Life Itself revels in the shameless emotional manipulation stemming from the ham-fisted tendencies of its own maker.
This buckaroo of a disc does not blow it on the image and sound front at least.
If it turned out to be Spielberg’s final film, it would make for a fitting final curtain call for his brand of escapism.
Thoroughbreds is a film about the disastrous perils of too little empathy, but it never evinces much of its own.
Initially colorful, the screenplay’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.
It unites a mélange of teen-film tropes into a narrative overburdened with cultural references and framing devices.
The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.
The signal refers to the Nomad hacker’s taunts, though it may as well point to the film’s nature as a self-styled calling card.
Director John Pogue is an elegant framer who orchestrates the film’s consistently chilly unease from a series of unassuming jolts embedded in the humdrum.
Bates Motel suggests what Gilmore Girls would’ve been like if it arbitrarily featured a tormented young Charles Manson.
