Clayton Dillard

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

It ironically reveals its intent to suture shut any remote ambivalence regarding its own gung-ho ethos, in effect engaging the same sort of oppressively dogmatic tactics it so outwardly denigrates.

Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.

The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.

A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.

There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.

Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.

Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.

Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.

For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.

Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.

Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.

Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.

As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.

The film is less a revisionist take on the circumstances of John Gotti's 1992 indictment than a tedious love child of Bonnie and Clyde and Goodfellas.

It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.

It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.

The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.

It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.

The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.

Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.

Christian Carion's film shamelessly wrings excitement from the recreation of violent ideological conflict.

Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.

It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.

Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.