Eli Friedberg

Retaining its narrow action-mechanical focus, the film struggles to paint a convincing interpersonal relationship as much as demonstrate the value of a co-op partner.

The surprise heart of the film, in this respect, is Pamela Anderson, who takes effortlessly to the kind of broad, marker-drawn, boiled-too-hard noir caricature that would’ve slotted right alongside Canada’s late king of deadpan, and effortfully to the kind of boisterous clowning and physical comedy erupting out of this po-faced caricature that would do the Zuckers proud.

The film isn’t slight on effort, and the Studio Ponoc crew isn’t lacking talent (better realized in their short-film anthology Modest Heroes). But The Imaginary seems crucially lacking in the very quality it so breathlessly extols: it’s technical competency without imaginative vision, nor deep understanding of children.

In Suzume, they deliver a general lack of focus or full realization of any one of dozens of well-intentioned ideas.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t an actively unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, but the glib literalism with which it applies cinematic narrative to video games’ abstractions can’t hold a candle to the wrenching pathos and self-discovery of a night on the track with real-life loved ones and Mario in his original medium.

The film’s intentionally amateurish visuals are deployed on audiences with the precision of a jackhammer, all in the interest of obscurantism.

Blomkamp, one suspects, does not possess the same imagination for interior worlds he’s exhibited for external. Demonic largely proves this thesis correct.

In a rare moment of open self-criticism, Gorbachev ponders that he was perhaps “too soft” on those traitorous countrymen who rallied to unseat him; that he ought to have had them “sent away.” It’s the lone sobering, tantalizing, self-aware peek into the savage realpolitik lurking beneath his noble words.

It’s a familiar traced sketch of 20th century imagined dystopias, but Gen-Z trappings evocative of our own looming dystopia offer a slightly new shade of color. It just isn’t vivid enough.

Hit or miss as it may be, Borat 2 at least doesn’t fall short on sheer audacious vulgarity.

A timely but confusing mess of styles, tones, and subject matter.