Chris Cabin

The filmmakers cut the film to emphasize the story's familiar plot points, rather than highlight any instances of personal visual artistry.

If there's a general air of emotional authenticity woven throughout all this garden-variety, faith-in-family hokum, it's in the racing scenes.

Much like his hero, Christopher Nolan's goal seems to be to take the humor and wildness out of imagination, to see invention in rigidly practical and scientific terms.

The film devolves quickly into a pedestrian character study that basks in Gary Webb's public shaming and victimization, losing sight of the bravery and probing talent that characterized his writing.

The flippancy toward the story's thematic concerns and character construction suggests that the film, like the boxtrolls' myriad gadgets and inventions, was largely built from used parts.

Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film's consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.

It only conveys the awesome strangeness of its characters and their universe when director Brian Singer breaks away from the perpetual build-up of the film's unwieldy plot.

The narrative doesn't want for ambition, but Marc Webb proves unwilling, or incapable, of making this unwieldy story feel like anything but a deluge of backstory.

For the most part, it's a gas, but the light touch Raymond De Felitta gives the material is at once its saving grace and its tremendous limiter.

When Jérôme Bonnell allows his two magnificent leads to work at the sparse dialogue, he invokes a powerful, elemental sense of frank, sexual discussion and high-end flirtation, imbuing the relationships with a maturity that's loathsomely rare in films today.

The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.

Though occasionally aesthetically alluring and evocative, feels like an introductory chapter to a more substantive, sprawling study of the actor.

All Is Bright remains engaging, for the most part, but most of the big narrative turns feel both predictable and forced, and at odds with the natural charms of the cast.

We're only allowed an insufficient glimpse of the anxiousness and curiosity that drive these creatures, a tactic which feels suspiciously like hesitance masquerading as enigma.

Though the cast partially eschews the family-friendly timidity that the film defers to in the end, this would-be wild thing remains little more than a rowdy endorsement of the status quo.

The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.

The film's aesthetic is marked by off-tempo editing and a tone that vacillates between grim and coy, and though it's occasionally visually evocative, it's also unmistakably over-calculated.

Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.

A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.

Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.