Christian Zilko

The film’s determination to shed light on systemic causes of dementia is admirable, but the real takeaway of Little Empty Boxes is that caring for a parent in a state of serious decline is an impossible task at which everyone is technically destined to “fail.” All we can do is our best, and the last true challenge is making peace with the fact that it will never be good enough.

Ultimately, The French Italian has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors.

At first glance, Bang Bang seems like a dreadfully cliche-ridden film. Nelson throws everything he has at the eponymous character, but the washed-up fighter archetype who spits poetry about the demons he now battles has been done to death. Yet it becomes clear those cliches are the point.

Rapaport and Farley’s script turns the speech patterns of amoral idiots into a science, relying on perfectly placed filler words and profanities to wrap horrible ideas in hilarious sentences.

The arc of time is long, but it bends toward justice, The Eyes of Ghana argues, and movies can help bend it a little further.

If King Hamlet has any legacy as a film, it will likely be as a comfort watch for Isaac’s superfans and Shakespeare devotees. It won’t be joining the canon of great nonfiction cinema, but I have no doubt that many viewers will find that watching a shirtless Oscar Isaac play with an adorable baby while quoting Shakespeare is a great use of 89 minutes.