The film is more straight-faced than Alexandre Aja’s prior work, trading absurd kills for narrow escapes from gaping alligator jaws.
Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.
Where the game goes in-depth, and where it clearly feels most comfortable, is in its omnipresent brawls.
Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting is the effect it has on the game’s atmosphere.
The miniseries does little more than reinforce everything the left always suspected about Fox News.
When the series isn’t immersed in pulpy shenanigans, it aspires to be a sort of Bostonian The Wire.
Euphoria’s central relationship is luminous, but the series struggles to develop its other characters.
As the series has continued, it’s grown more outlandish, oppressive, and removed from the things that made it so captivating.
Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it’s meant to be that way.
It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.
The series visibly struggles to spin an enveloping atmosphere around its ideas.
Ava DuVernay’s series is a handsomely mounted dramatization, but it often veers into the trite, obvious, and maudlin.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it’s viewed is not.
Despite a more straightforward approach, the series still boasts Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s unmistakable voice.
This is less a miniseries as five-hour movie than episodic television, with new narrative wrinkles introduced each week.
The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.
The game is ambitious for its translation mechanics and its big-picture look at the evolution of culture through the ages.
Once an accidental act of violence sends the main character’s life into a spiral, the film unfortunately spirals with him.
The show’s greatest strength is still the way it upends our expectations via tonal shifts and amusing personal details.
There’s an unsteadiness to this return to that certain dimension of sight, sound, and, of course, mind that dulls whatever impact it intends.