Abhimanyu Das

It comes down on the essential hollowness of traditional gender roles like the avalanche that proves to be its inciting event.

The romantic elements are secondary to what is essentially an astute and cleverly written dissection of a co-dependent friendship being gradually eroded by the incremental ravages of age, rivalry, and rapidly diverging personal arcs.

An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to sustain it, the film plays like a show reel for writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's considerable craft.

Vulgar auteurist Luc Besson finally commits wholeheartedly to his decades-long preoccupation with waifish young women discovering their inner Shiva, spinning the concept out to its most delirious possible extremes.

It labors under the illusion that an abundance of Sub Pop memorabilia is adequate substitute for the honest evocation of a creative subculture and the personalities of which it's composed.

What Lumet or Cassavetes often showed with a look, an image, a movement, Canet chooses to tell, and often at length, with the most heavy-handed dialogue imaginable.

Its horrors go beyond any single raggedy phantom, reaching back to the primordial fear of death and loss: of a child, of a loved one, of one's own sense of self.

The film plays for much of its length like a terrible sketch comedy with one-dimensional caricatures shuffling listlessly through a succession of stilted tableaux.

The material plays out like a particularly busy episode of Sons of Anarchy, possessing a peculiar joylessness that's anathema to the success of films like this.

The film is depressing, sub-sitcom fodder that will dull whatever affection you may still harbor for these legendary actors.

An admirable refusal to adhere to any overexposed poverty-porn templates, however, is taken a little too far in the opposite direction, to the point that the film feels self-consciously shapeless.

It fails as a critique of draconian security states and surveillance culture, moving too fast to properly consider any of the well-worn ideas it glosses over.

From the opening montage alone, it's clear that Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith plans to play his cards close to the vest in this maddeningly underwritten thriller/domestic-drama hybrid.

There's nothing behind all this sturm und drang but a lineup of insubstantial ciphers, all false fronts and empty words in a pretend world not quite conducive to emotional investment.

The laziest sort of political cinema, full of straw men and finger-pointing, wrapped up in an awards-friendly bow by its beautiful cinematography and a manipulative world music-y score.