Liaison lacks an inventive approach or even a satisfying character-driven angle.
Kino’s exquisite 4K transfer is easily the best that Eastern Promises has looked on home video to date.
The newest release of Christophe Gans’s cult film will leave you howling for something better.
The film doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.
The film is less concerned with placing Gauguin in his historical context than it is with his emotional tribulations.
Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.
Where Paul Greengrass’s action sequences were once visceral and intentionally unpleasant, now they just titillate.
Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.
Dolan adapts a talky play into something that could feasibly have the same emotional effect as a silent film.
Eventually, director Matteo Garrone’s self-consciously patchwork, one-thing-after-another structure wears thin.
The hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.
My King might have been more resonant had Maïwenn allowed more time and space for her characterizations to organically develop.
Ariel Kleiman fashions an erotic atmosphere of dusty sensuality that complicates our judgement of this world.
The most telling revelation in Tale of Tales has little to do with ugly sisters, transmogrified monsters, or angry ogres.
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 draws out Danny Boyle’s less dazzling commercial side, not to mention his penchant for whirling excess.
Dominik Moll never addresses Matthew Gregory Lewis’s original groundbreaking ideas in the film, nor does he rework the material for a contemporary audience.
Kassovitz’s iconic film about race, violence, and class struggle is both rousing entertainment and brilliant filmmaking.
Every character’s gesture is paradoxically bombastic and consequential.
As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances.