Mank’s most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.
Brandon Cronenberg’s film is obsessed with tensions between mind and body and old and new technologies.
The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.
What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.
The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.
After a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.
Inventive in its visual effects, but it’s a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum embedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.
Ian Softley is far too interested in the minutia of the plot to bother with the Chabrolian elements of bourgeois excess or the Hitchcockian themes of mistaken identity.