Chris Cabin

Neither sentimentality nor nostalgia for reckless years gone by can be found in Rebecca Zlotowski's Belle Epine, which makes its tale of teenage rebellion in the face of overwhelming grief fall closer to a sobering character study than a classical youth film.

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

The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.

For the most part, the documentary succeeds in conveying a galvanizing sense of what made Winehouse so immediately engaging.

The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane's racy, dick-centric sense of humor.

The story wisely focuses on the cast's worn-in and jazzy repartee and expresses a perfectly modulated sense of self-awareness.

After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug.

If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.

In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.

It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.

The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.

Throughout, Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.

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

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.

The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.

Josh Heald's script takes the easy way out, ending the film with a torrent of slapdash sentimentality.

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.

It's tructured in familiar, safe terms, plays for very low stakes, and appeals to no one so much as white, male teenagers with chips on their shoulders.

The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.

The film delivers the same misogynistic, faux-modernistic jolts of trashy humor and labored plotting that typify the work of co-producer Michael Bay.

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.

As much as the film is primarily a genre workout for director Kevin McDonald, the script makes room for a tough-minded, psychologically corrosive depiction of vengeance.

It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.

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.

It does well to put more focus on delivering a plethora of jokes, imitations, zippy repartee, and sight gags than its plot's familiar machinations.

Adrián García Bogliano ends up merely toying with the death-steeped concerns of his characters, and taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative's ponderous dramatic core for granted.

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.

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.

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.

The film is thematically thin, and it has a tendency to embrace the action genre's more obnoxious elements, but there's a proudly no-nonsense air to its nonsensicality.

One long trial of moral duty, and one that excuses repugnant behavior and psychological warfare in lieu of a repetitive, condescending sermon on honoring thy father.

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 dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice, but the ramifications are political as well.

The film's criticism isn't primarily rooted in satire, but rather in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.

Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.

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.

All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.

The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman's fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle's attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.

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.

An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.

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

Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.

For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.

A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.

By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz's backsides.

It's hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff's second feature as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.

However messy this overextended and oddly compelling work feels from moment to moment, the end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.

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.

Pawel Pawlikowski shows great empathy toward the idea of illusions as a way of attaining emotional stability in even the most brutal terrain.

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.

Jon Favreau's film comes off as flippant in its view of independent labor as a universally liberating experience for an artist and businessman.

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.

The film is thin on concept and limited in style, but the filmmakers have the good sense to let their characters remain playful and goofy throughout.

That Dom is so clearly an up-to-11 caricature, embodied with reliable pizzazz by Jude Law, makes the sentimental moments feel especially false.

There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.

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.

Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.

Even when compared to other films posing as Ford Mustang commercials, Need for Speed isn't particularly memorable for anything other than the startling incompetence and dull sheen of the end result.

The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.

Fantasy is heavily dependent on vision, which Mark Helprin had in spades, but the look of Akiva Goldsman's fantasy is limp, timid, and occasionally outright awkward.

The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.

There's no personality in the design or the script, which only renders the cynical aftertaste of this convoluted one-squirrel-against the-world story all the more potent.

The strain to make the film both an educational tool and a child-minded entertainment is noticeable throughout.

The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.

The breadth of Vince Vaughn's gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn't the game-changer.

The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.

Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.

The film is absent of humor and thrills, and accented with designs and color schemes that are equally notable for their lack of risk.

A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.

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.

As played by an eloquently beleaguered Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is arguably the most vivid and complex character the Coens have dreamed up since Marge Gunderson.

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.

A surprisingly thoughtful romantic comedy that shirks a great deal of reason and consequence in the name of love.

The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.

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.

Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.

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.

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.

The film doubles down on the love-hate relationship with ultra-violence that typified its predecessor, but A History of Violence this is not.

With the film, Lee Daniels quietly pushes his talent for hashing out visceral, violent emotions into unexpected dramatic terrain.

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.

A cheekily gruesome and genuinely urgent entertainment, Blomkamp's latest nevertheless can't help but beg the question: Where's Snake Plissken when you need him?

Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.

An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.

The obvious amount of hard work that went into this out-of-touch sequel is partly what makes it so irritating.

It's hard to ignore the fact that a substantial percentage of Letourneur's would-be character study is dedicated to concentrated Schadenfreude that's unbalanced and without any real narrative weight.

Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.

The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.

Like most of Neil LaBute's work in the field of "emotional terrorism," the film protests that bad behavior isn't only good, but also essential to art.

The zombies twitch, leap, gnash, and destroy, but the film has all the thrill and surprise of a model U.N. summit.

All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.

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 art of storytelling is both of distinct narrative interest and personal issue in the latest payload of calcified nonsense from one of modern cinema's oddest would-be auteurs.

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.

Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.

Wang Bing's no-frills style of documentation visually echoes the preadolescent trio's simple yet unforgiving world and its sense of labor as life.

Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.

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.

A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.

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.

Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.

Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.

Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.

A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.

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

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.

Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.

Black Sabbath speaks to the vastness of Bava’s abilities in the realms of the terrifying and the supernatural.

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.

True to its title, The Endless Summer exudes a blissful, mellow buzz that could easily be misconstrued as lazy or innocuous filmmaking.

The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.

I still stare at it, amazed and entertained, but dwarfed by the very idea of attempting to untangle the crow’s nest that has formed through the film’s ever-expanding histories. And what continuously stupefies me is that time works no miracles on this particular film: Scenes remain familiar, but the narrative seems to shift every time I return to it.

Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.

The Great Escape is that rare war film that doesn’t fully indulge in assumed nationalism, save for the fact that everyone speaks English. Sturges never touches on the essential hollowness and cruel pageantry of war, but he does the next best thing by depicting an international effort where victory, no matter how short-lived, depends on the cooperation of myriad talents, rather than the gruff can-do attitude of an unbreakable chosen one.

The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.

The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed.

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.

Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun.

Thematically, Cinderella preaches something far more easily tangible and relatable to the everyday than a flying elephant, romantic pooches, or mining dwarves: respect and understanding for hard work and those who tirelessly labor with no need for false praise or special consideration.

Clue is comfortable with its pedigree, even giddily enthused by it, which gives its creators freedom to produce not a nostalgic entertainment, but a sustained and sincerely old-fashioned entertainment, laced with wicked miscreancy.

Isao Takahata makes survival the thematic core of the story, but he never degrades his characters or fetishizes their suffering.

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

There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it.

The film has something for everyone but, in effect, offers nothing of substance to anyone. The interplay between Ameche, Cronyn, and Brimley allow for some lively, even touching scenes in a product—and make no mistake, a product is exactly what it is—that is, at best, adequate.

The lack of sentimentality helps focus the viewer on what the film depicts exceptionally well, namely wanton bad behavior and enthralling, wall-to-wall ass-kicking.

Martin Rosen’s eloquent, wondrous film offers a deceivingly simple yet powerful view of a war-ridden rabbit society.

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.

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.

Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, Some Like It Hot was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner.

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.

It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It's in this view of the military life, and competition in general, that Porco Rosso reveals itself to be one of Miyazaki’s most personal works.

Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent.

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

Shot by Charles Lang, one of the greatest American cinematographers to ever live, Charade is some sort of miraculous entertainment, self-aware and self-parodying yet never distancing or detached. Hepburn is the audience’s funny and flighty proxy, allowing us the great pleasure of being seduced by Grant’s unpredictable charmer.

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.

It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.

Even now, It Happened One Night carries the unmistakable tenor of a breakout hit, fueled by confidently zippy repartee and manic comic invention that almost none of the innumerable pretenders to the throne of romantic comedy can match.

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.

For Lloyd, Thalberg, and the writers, the point of the film was to tell a compelling story and, like the Bounty’s inebriated physician creating various tall tales to explain his wooden leg, facts and meanings ultimately just got in their way of crafting a great entertainment.

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

Maniac simply exists as a wretched yet unforgettable succession of scenes meant to corrupt even the purest of minds, if you can help yourself from laughing uncontrollably at its overwhelming amount of inconsistencies.

What the film lacks in narrative drive, coherence, and performance, it makes up with thoughtful lighting, strong cinematography from Raoul Lomas and an uncredited João Fernandes, and, of course, Savini’s lovingly overblown and impossible splatter effects.