Jay Weissberg

Even if Tornatore were deliberately aiming for the artificiality that clings to nearly every frame, the pic would still feel needlessly airless, hampered by an Italian-to-English script translation that may be precise but lacks naturalism.

There’s a confused sci-fi element and a perfunctory nod to society’s benumbed attitude toward violence, but really, the pic is just an excuse for more splatter from a director who, as always, knows his target audience.

A solid, and solidly engaging film that nevertheless feels like an extended promo for the Branson brand.

The camera barely leaves Trinca’s side. She delivers an over-sized, nervy performance but the material is so flawed that it’s hard to truly say whether it’s exceptional acting.

Rather than any outward show of police or physical repression, the directors suffuse their drama with a sense of paranoia and constant surveillance, chillingly capturing the fear of one man forced into a moral dilemma.

Ensuring that most characters are neither all-good nor all-bad means “Guilty Men” is a much more human film than other dramas basing themselves on often clear-cut Westerns.

A little more attention to side characters would have brought increased depth, but the movie still packs a major punch at the end.

Yet given the opportunity for misinterpretation, it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t find a way of reworking the story to ensure the taint of anti-immigration rhetoric couldn’t be applied to what’s designed as a children’s tale.

It’s a film of big themes on an intimate scale that lovingly acknowledges the unimaginable wealth of stories inside everyone we encounter, while also looking at how we negotiate the place of memory in our lives.

This crowdfunded labor of love is unlikely to generate much buzz but will be appreciated by audiences looking for congenial entertainment.

The River, concludes a trilogy consisting of “The Mountain” and “The Valley,” and while it’s his most objectively beautiful feature yet, it also gives nothing away, demanding a heightened engagement with both his artful mise-en-scène and his nation’s psychological state.

Given ongoing developments, it’s no surprise the film concludes abruptly, and knowing that there’s been no power change in the country so far adds an inherent level of bleakness, yet Paluyan captures the hopes of a population that spans across gender and generations, and there will always be something uplifting about watching people fight peacefully for freedom.