Carson Lund

It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.

This time around, in spotlighting Liam Neeson's fatigued charisma, Jaume Collet-Serra's formidable filmmaking chops have plateaued.

A phony collection of storytelling clichés held under the banner of archetype and lent a modicum of weight by the splendor of the landscape.

The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.

Its greatest asset, and another trait it shares with Mann and Fincher's work, is a careful attention toward the particulars of its milieu in a way that doesn't call attention to those period touches.

The final optimism of the film's worldview lands with a conviction that's rare in contemporary Hollywood cinema—a resilience that's strong enough for Liam Neeson to ride out on.

The film’s default state is an ambient inertia that gestures vaguely in multiple directions without concerning itself with the hard work of constructing an argument, a convincing milieu, or even a compelling mood.

It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.

The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.

The film is about floating along on currents of uncertain desire and excitement, overthinking your own indulgence in these whims, and then sometime later on down the road, through no clear constellation of reasons, recognizing that a real human connection was squandered in the haze of all that self-exploration.

It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.

When the appeal of the film's whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.

Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.

The film, whose disparate narrative threads unsurprisingly never connect, drowns in weirdness for its own sake.

The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.

Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.

It grapples with emotional enigma of infatuation, and the question of how such a mighty force can also be so fleeting.

Most gratifying throughout A Cure for Wellness is the moment-to-moment anticipation of where Gore Verbinski will put his camera next.

A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.

The whole affair suggests dramatic Tetris, and it leeches the artist and his process of any mystery.

Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.

Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.

If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.

What’s so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America’s universe-specific innovations renders the film indispensable in context.

From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.

The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.

The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.

The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.

Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.

For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.

Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.

Never once does it project an intuitive understanding of how humans would behave or react in the midst of such a shattering misfortune.

Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.

That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.

The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.

The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.

This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but James Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency.