Chris Cabin

Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.

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.

Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.

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.

Takahata’s wondrous film is itself at constant interplay between the unsentimental realities of human progress (and expansion) and the unbound thoughts and creative perspectives that fantasy can entertain without necessarily being reduced to mere entertainment.

As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.

Hancock lays the groundwork for Eastwood to transform what might have been an admirable, tightly told entertainment into something far more emotionally resonant, slyly self-aware, and rich in subtext.

Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.

The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.

Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée has created a film out of Cheryl Strayed's beloved 2012 memoir that never quite matches the blunt audacity of its simple title.

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

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.

David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.

Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.

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.

Though its politics are still quite progressive, La Cage aux Folles is ultimately a work of classicism, crafted with precision and efficiently paced.

When Xavier Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.

By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.

A full realization of the very worst fears one could imagine when its director, James Wan, unexpectedly emerged from the torture-porn murk with its original, spiritedly directed predecessor.

The film's exasperating atonality washes out any legitimate idea about identity, education, nature versus nurture, or artificial intelligence that Neill Blomkamp hoped to evince.

Roberto Minervini has created a moving portrait of feminism born out of hard work and intuitiveness, but he never belittles or condescends to the faithful.

The remnants of war are fractious and far-flung in Clint Eastwood's impressive revisionist western.

It’s a giddy, diabolical, and terminally underappreciated sequel to the film that made Joe Dante’s career.

Opening Night hits closest to home in its long, haunting, tension-fueled riffs between Cassavetes and Rowlands, playing lovers on stage and former lovers off stage.

Of course, Alice in Wonderland has long been the Disney film of choice in the realm of drug cinema, but this radical and ridiculous trip through a bombastically colored otherworld imparts a balanced wisdom that goes beyond bong-rip philosophizing.

That the filmmakers consistently catch the nuances of character that bind the two men to each other, rather than simply tracing the pros and cons of their dispositions, is what gives the film its melancholic yet vibrant resonance.