Ed Frankl

The film’s pitfalls lie in the style-over-substance route that has befallen many films that have such an annoyingly gimmicky framing device at its center.

While Kateb is a fine presence, Colmar (a co-writer of the far superior Of Gods and Men) directs with none of his protagonist’s thrilling pizazz, and his and Salatko’s script plods without any of jazz’s syncopated rhythms

All the Dead Ones is an accomplished film by directing duo Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, rich in the nation’s poetry and music, daring in highlighting women’s voices while commenting on Brazil’s history of inequality of wealth, class, and race.

Set in the picturesque Portuguese city of the title, the film demonstrates first-time fiction director Gabe Klinger’s eye for visual storytelling, but his script, co-written by Larry Gross, feels undeveloped for anything further than glib, Instagram-like testaments to cherished moments in time.

Director Adler has made a very talky film, full of interior scenes and far flung from the hard-edged spy thrillers of Bond or Bourne.

While the first half has a brisk, upfront approach, the final hour is gobsmackingly dull - with emphasis on the smacking.

So much is thrown at the wall that some of it's got to stick - comedy for comedy's sake, if you will - and while that doesn't make for a great film necessarily, it certainly doesn't make for a bad one.

When you're pining for Bill Paxton and the relative emotional realism of Twister, you know you're in trouble.

Benoit Jacquot’s preposterous erotic thriller is rarely erotic and never thrills.

Akin has made the true story of a repulsive, grotesque serial killer into a repulsive, grotesque movie, a calamitous misfire for a critical darling of recent German cinema.

Does Michael Bay fit the criteria of an auteur? He certainly has his own line of distinctive tropes: the migraine-inducing noise, the fetishistic gloss, the playground-bully characters elevated to hero status and a fervently male gaze.

The provocativeness in Sparta is not necessarily in Ewald’s actions, but in the sympathetic, or at least non-judgmental, view that the film shows toward its main character. The film’s villains instead are more plainly the children’s absent, abusive fathers or the system that neglects these youngsters to the extent that they fall willingly into the arms of a would-be predator.