Charlie Schmidlin

An honest and sharply drawn account of the eternal questions of ego, friendship, and sacrifice in the comedy world.

The strength of Linklater’s films have always been their ability to capture the textures of lived experience, and Everyone Wants Some!! is no different in that regard: it is a confident, hugely enjoyable return to a universe that treats the connection to “Dazed and Confused” not as an obligation or cash grab, but as inspiration to match that film’s level of energy and cast chemistry.

Intimate, singular, and hallucinatory on all aesthetic levels, the film strips politics down to the bone, not always successful but never opportunistic.

The Big Short ends up an energetic, absorbing version of these events, marked deeply by its director’s uniquely surreal vision.

Structuring their modern tale around the Mark Twain narratives, the sibling directors find laughs, pathos, and some surprising storytelling twists, plus have a game cast to deliver it.

While it conjures up a winning swirl of themes, lines and images as it unfurls, one suspects that Schwartzman’s considerable talents are compensating for some core deficiencies.

There is enough in 6 Years from Farmiga and Rosenfield’s performances to warrant a watch, and Fidell’s ideas and subtle developments around such a challenging story are heartfelt and mostly well-rendered.

For its majority, the film is all comedic and political fire, but as its winds down, Timoner rounds it off with a tone of melancholic, tragic inevitability to Brand’s life.

A stunner of a directorial debut.

In noir, nobody is certified as who they claim to be. Boyle magnifies that aspect with a lean and gripping thriller about isolation, strangers, and the consequences of fame that satisfies despite some minor plot bumps.

A protagonist of stunted emotional growth is simply assumed from Apatow at this stage, but Schumer’s perspective and voice translates to a wealth of gags that breathe new life into the idea.

Selma is vital correspondence, filmmaking lived on the streets where brutal facts were ignored then reported, and now snatched back from history to sustain a spirit few films can or will possess. It is stunning humanistic cinema on a mainstream scale... It has inventiveness, urgency, humor, and most of all emotion that draws effortless parallels rather than leaving its lesson up on the screen.

Eastwood wisely trains the camera on Cooper's face and keeps it there — he knows his actor can carry the story’s emotion when other aspects fail it.

The entire film could start to feel like a feature-length justification, but Darius manages to sidestep that path by never letting himself off the hook.

To his credit (and without affectation), Gondry doesn’t cloak the fact that he is often perplexed by his subject. Because of his confusion though, we are able to learn quite a lot.

Together, all four cast members help draw a line across the narrative—separating when we were watching a mildly engaging depiction of names, dates, and locations, and a hellish, immersive situation with no easy outcome in sight.