Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.
In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.
Its themes are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
Noah Hawley treats his protagonist’s story as a somber tragedy that at times stoops to trashiness.
The film feels composed of burnished, often blackly funny, fragments of erratic memory.
The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.
Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.
Steven Soderbergh takes a macro approach to the scandal, though the results, with rare exception, are vexingly micro.
The film is one that might have been dreamed up by one of the cynical douche bros from the Hangover during a blacked-out stupor.
Waititi is incapable of dealing with the twin horrors of oppression and indoctrination beyond cheap-seats sentimentality and joke-making.
It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.
Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.
Now this 15-hour-plus epic runs at 25fps, as per the original German TV broadcast.
M. Night Shyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.
There’s barely enough substance in Destroyer to support an Aesop’s fable, let alone a Los Angeles crime epic.
The film receives one of the best blockbuster home-video releases of the year—and just in time for the holiday season.
The festival doesn’t try to keep glamour at a pronounced distance from anything that might be considered unsightly.
You may admire the construction of certain moments more than you feel them, or Boy Erased as a whole, in your bones.
The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams.
Chemistry counts for something, and Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek have it in spades in The Old Man & the Gun.