Charles Bramesco

The script’s attempts at wisdom amount to little more than dime-store platitudes, and the internecine turmoil of the Arashikage clan never comes close to anything like emotional heft.

The evasive, guarded acting from the main players can only do so much to elevate the paltry material Nikou gives them to work with. A long, fitfully amusing walk down a short road.

However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

A scattered but likable jumble, the film has a thoughtful manner more than it has actual thoughts, much like the trio of quasi-intellectuals joining forces with Markus.

Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.

The good news is that the director’s ambitions, no matter how inadvisable, have attracted a strong cast and occasioned some of their best work.

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

Allergic to the ponderous brand of overdetermined ‘metaphorror’ currently in vogue, Cregger possesses a showman’s instincts, his energies primarily invested in pound-for-pound entertainment value. Maybe that’s why the subject at hand feels so perfunctory, the broad feminist stance filling out the vacant space in otherwise unrelated macro- and micro-scaled tricks of structuring.

The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

Farahani’s elegiac documentary takes far more interest in Mohassess the man than Mohassess the artist.

Heineman’s thesis that because leaving has gone so poorly, staying would’ve necessarily been better is incorrect at best, and disingenuous at worst. He wants to think structurally, aware that America can and does flatten other nations beneath our clumsy footfalls. He just can’t — or won’t — see the whole structure out of apparent fear that it’ll be too unflattering for all involved, including him, the army’s useful launderer of their image-sanitizing talking points.

Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.

Scott and Poo have seized on one substantive idea in their portraiture of a singular personality reduced to a caricature of himself by posterity and duly reveal the sensitive artiste who always aspired to more than “Top Gun.” If only they did so with less straightforwardness and more authorial license.

Never lacking in earnestness or vigor, she nonetheless teeters over the lines separating introspection from navel-gazing and the raw from the simply underdone.

This prodigal son’s reappearance ignites a rivalry a little Biblical and a little Shakespearean, though their macho melodrama hews most closely to the flavor of screenwriterly contrivance.

For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.

The character dynamics are still as rich as when Sherriff first realised them, and C Company’s supporting servicemen add a few complementary hues to this portrait of militarised despair.... And yet Dibb’s direction doesn’t leave the actors enough room to breathe.

Moselle is at her most astute when concentrating on the fragile social dynamics that govern the tribes adolescents divide themselves into for survival’s sake.

Western media has trained us to brace for the worst in works engaging with the fanatical corners of Islam, and so the ground-level sobriety in Saleh’s treatment lands as a blessing all its own.

Everything on the menu of The Menu looks good enough, but once its moldy tirade against the one percent has been fully dished out, it’s plain to see there’s not a whole lot of meat on the bone here.

The lackluster Little Fish banks on the automatic pathos of its subject matter, unaware that such delicate material actually requires greater skill and finesse to pull off, now more than ever. Rather than imbuing this unintended commentary with a cathartic charge, its proximity to reality accentuates the air of inauthenticity.

To fully understand Cohn, to see how the larger-than-life force shaping the latter half of the 20th century came to mold the 21st as well, requires a more penetrating approach than Tyrnauer’s easily digested, skin-deep survey.

Having set out to shock and ultimately shatter his audience, a film-maker unwilling or incapable of hitting the tonal brakes succeeds in his mission, only to compromise a deeper dramatic power along the way.