Ed Gonzalez

The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.

Complicating Sophie Turner's character would have allowed the film to feel as if it had more on its mind than pulling the rug out from under us.

The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.

Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.

Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.

The film is only in the business of supplying the sort of fear that hinges entirely on the shock of the exotic.

The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.

Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.

It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.

The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.

At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.

The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.

The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.

It's a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller's patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.

By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.

The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.

The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.

Every incident in the film is a time-bidding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.

The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.

One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.

The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.