The series trades Marvel’s typically dire stakes and intergalactic scale for lighthearted intimacy.
Alan Ball quickly loses sight of the sense of power that fuels the film’s early moments when his characters basically just gaze at each other.
This is another quarter-billion-dollar installment in the world’s longest and most expensive screensaver.
Throughout Avengeners: Infinity War, rapidity (of dialogue and drama) is mistaken for actual rhythm.
Like the play, it makes something so viable, tense, and compelling out of the anxious boredom of trench warfare.
The fun of the action scenes exacerbates the failure of the narrative to adequately contend with its own themes.
The characters’ homelessness is less indicative of a real-life epidemic and more akin to window dressing.
Joss Whedon’s film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.
If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the end of Escape from L.A., you’d still wind up with something more human.
Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.
Director Shane Black here replaces his once-acidic spite for government and bureaucracy with a call for corporate responsibility.
Enhanced picture, enhanced sound, enhanced film: The Avengers feels like it’s truly in its element on the small screen.
Joss Whedon—to some, the standard-bearer for fanboy culture—is a strong, classical stylist in the tradition of Joe Dante, John Landis, and Steven Spielberg.
Strange as it may sound, the absence of melodrama is the film’s greatest strength.
In the way it unimaginatively regurgitates familiar genre elements in service of preachy piousness, Scott Charles Stewart’s cinema is the equivalent of Christian rock.
Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.
According to Chandor’s logic, most of these characters are blameless victims by the time Margin Call takes place.
When not simply functioning as a sorry excuse for a thriller, The Tourist also operates as the Angelina Jolie Ego Trip Show.
The tedious Legion teaches us nothing, except that Paul Bettany matches a fetching brunette.
Aside from the sight of a monstrous granny climbing a ceiling on all fours, there’s little genre juice to these lackluster proceedings.