Carson Lund

For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.

For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.

As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance.

If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.

As in Nathan Silver's previous work, what could have been a rote retread of Pasolini's Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics.

A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.

What comes through clearly by the end of the film is the act of one artist's eccentric generosity breathing new awareness into the life of another.

It's true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr's frenetic style-mashing and Dumont's unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc's life, but it's also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it.

Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.

What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.

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.