Ed Gonzalez

The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.

Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.

The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.

A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.

It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.

Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.

The titular signal refers to the Nomad hacker's taunts, though it may as well point to the film's nature as a self-styled calling card.

Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.

A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.

The constant foregrounding of so much well-executed incident only works to shortchange the heroes' yearnings and anxieties.

Given the liberties the film takes, it's surprising that it refuses to penetrate Alan Turing's carnality and allow Benedict Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man's sexuality.

Meticulous in its adherence to conventional narrative inducement, this biopic only offers a sanded-down and embossed vision of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde's 30-year marriage.

For a spell, the film gets by on its unpretentious flair for atmosphere, even its disconcerting nonsensicality.

As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.

Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny.

Though The Conjuring claims to be based on a true story, in truth it's based on every horror film that's come before it.

Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity then that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.

Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.

While the drones are still cuter than Ewoks, Lowell remains a cloying representation of a ‘70s acid freak shoving his save-the-trees mantra down your throat.

The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.

Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.

Ali‘s narrative laxness comes at the fault of boxing time (a good one-third of the film’s three-hour time span is spent inside the ring). You say: But Mann knows how to direct a fight. But I say: So what?

Had we been allowed to truly sit with the characters’ prejudices, then The Damned might have earned the desperation with which it strains for contemporary resonance.

The film is beholden to a strange internal logic that gives primacy not to its protagonist's suffering, but to its maker's thirst for fun.

It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.

Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.