Jaime N. Christley

Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.

The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.

The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.

David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.

What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.

The lightning in the film’s bottle isn’t some generic feel-good humanism, but a complicated one, fighting for its own existence, sometimes angry, sometimes despondent.

In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.

The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.

The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.

One may feel dissatisfied by the 11th-hour turn toward lyrical fatalism, and mildly insulted by the presumptuous attitude it seems to choose as it sends us on our way.

As funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it's a tiresome sequel doesn't save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes.

The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.

It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.

Glides from a mildly off-putting opening across several scenes that waver between sitcom superficiality and sudden, unexpected gusts of feeling, ultimately ending on a note of perfectly judged emotional ambivalence.

Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories

At this point in the franchise, Anderson is content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting, all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense.

Regarding Michel Piccoli's Max, Claude Sautet's film resists judgment, neither condoning nor signposting the despicable nature of his choices.

One successful set piece in 135 minutes, and it involves very little running, no parkour, and no genetically enhanced superheroes from clandestine government projects.

Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.

In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.

After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.

While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.

While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.

The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.

After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.

The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.

Made possible by the half a billion dollars Clash of the Titans garnered worldwide, Wrath of the Titans sputters and coughs on the fumes of its own inevitability.

It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.

This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.

Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.

It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.

It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.

The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.

Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.

What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.

It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.

Deep End is as soaked in pheromones and nervous electricity as Mike, but he's as much a product of the world of desire that surrounds him as one of its participants, and when the end finally comes, there's only a reprise of earlier dream imagery to suggest that there was anything other than a spasmodic, hormonal twitch involved in bringing about its conclusion.

There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.

The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"

A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.

The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.

Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.

More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.

It’s a weird experience that Kitano is offering to movie audiences: We thrill to the violent, heroic exploits that leave many a pierced eyeball, many a severed limb, many a bullet-riddled corpse, but we find uplift in his celebration of community, music, dance, light, color, and companionship.

William Wellman’s 1937 version of this oft-told tale, of the rising starlet and the plummeting alcoholic has-been she refuses to cast aside, is usually regarded as the second-best of the lot, a few steps behind George Cukor’s 1954 remake, which has the unfair advantage of being one of the unimpeachable masterpieces of American film.

Metropolitan celebrates and mourns the specific character of a place and time, youthful associations and crushes, a toolkit of values, even if those values are not exactly shared by, say, housewives in Duluth and auto mechanics in Albuquerque.

Gordon Willis's too-dark lensing is an ideal match for the Scenes from a Marriage-inspired sequences of marital and amorous discord.

Few films have expressed, with as much force and lyricism as Ozu’s Late Spring, the various emotions (melancholy, bittersweet joy, impassioned regret, taciturn resignation) associated with the ongoing, perpetual dissolution of “the world as we know it.”

The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all.

A good platter for a great, underappreciated classic of British cinema (under the direction of American expatriate Cy Endfield)—light on supplements but strong in presentation.

Preminger had the confidence in his performers and faith in his intelligent viewers: a happy combination.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.

The movie, like a day at Disney World, pulls the viewer through an incessant, nigh-claustrophobic landscape of surrealism and fun. Resistance is futile; the sugar is the medicine.

Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.

Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.