The Game of Thrones prequel struggles to apply new makeup to the old face of palace intrigue.
As the film invites us to ponder the real-world circumstances that it implies, its self-seriousness becomes a double-edged sword.
Much of the show’s drama pivots around how successful it will be at slowly pulling back the curtain.
The series preserves Stephen King novel’s ingenious plot while entirely altering its tone.
The battle of wills between Lavrentiy Beria and Nikita Khrushchev propels the film’s most pointed satire.
Director Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts is a tedious exercise in dystopian chic.
Throughout, director Justin Kurzel’s stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices.
It winningly reflects how to utilize quiet understandings and, yes, very loud laughter.
It’s at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state’s rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.
The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically “uplifting,” and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.
Paddy Considine’s benumbed ambiguity at least works against writer-director Shan Khan’s reduction of honor killings to grist for the cheapest of pulpy thrills.
Whatever the film’s interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.
The film turns the miscommunication between cultures into an utterly lifeless romantic comedy best appreciated as a travel guide for first-time tourists to Paris.
It confidently and openly grapples with its weighty thematic issues before sublimating them into something supernatural.
Tyrannosaur is one mean movie, an aggressively harsh extension of Paddy Considine’s’s 2007 short Dog Altogether.
Emphasis, as always, will be on the “Dragons and Tigers” program of over 40 features (plus compilations, mid-length films and shorts) from Asia.
An occasionally strange B-action programmer gets an indifferent American DVD transfer.
Mostly, Submarine succeeds by perfectly recapturing the way teenagers behave.
The brutality of Tyrannosaur isn’t so over the top as to make Paddy Considine’s sympathy for his flawed characters look like a sham.
Tyrannosaur never convincingly justifies its pessimistic gender-warfare worldview.