Richard Brody

The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all.

Glazer’s movie is a presentation of nearly unfathomable horrors by way of bathos, alluding to enormities in the form of minor daily inconveniences. There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully.

In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi yokes Johnson’s formidable cinematic intelligence to an elaborate feat of fan service that feels, above all, like the rhetorical and dramatic gratification of a religious sect.

There’s a significant work of art lurking within “Anora,” but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler.

With its clean lines and precise assembly, it's nearly devoid of fundamental practicalities, and, so, remains an idea for a movie about ideas, an outline for a drama that's still in search of its characters.

The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

Oppenheimer sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance.

The narrow and merely illustrative drama is matched, unfortunately, by an impersonal cinematography that fails to suggest texture or intimacy.

The simplifications and sanitizations of Brooklyn would be only dreary if they merely served the purpose of a streamlined and simplified story-telling mechanism. What renders them odious is the ethos that they embody, the worldview that they package.

Birdman trades on facile, casual dichotomies of theatre versus cinema and art versus commerce. It’s a white elephant of a movie that conceals a mouse of timid wisdom, a mighty and churning machine of virtuosity that delivers a work of utterly familiar and unoriginal drama.

The film’s pleasures and its frustrations, its energies and its enervations, are inseparable.

The two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style that isn’t achieved—and that undercuts the mighty import of the play.

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

It’s a strange movie—far better as a concept than as a drama, though the concept is strong enough to provide a sense of inner experience, making up for what the outer, onscreen experience lacks.

The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.

The failure of The Rider to see Brady in his intellectual and experiential specificity, to render him as interesting as the dramatic shell in which Zhao places him, is a failure of directorial imagination.

Burnham’s eye for detail and nuance is keen, and several scenes...have a tightly scripted tension, but he smothers the story in sentiment, stereotypes, and good intentions. Despite Fisher’s calm and vivid performance, Kayla remains merely a collection of traits.

Rees uses voice-overs to bring the many characters to life, but the text is thin; the movie’s exposition is needlessly slow and stepwise, and the drama, though affecting, is literal and oversimplified.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

Judas and the Black Messiah needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood has been called Tarantino’s most personal film, and that may well be true—it’s far more revealing about Tarantino than about Hollywood itself, and his vision of the times in question turns out to be obscenely regressive.

As a form of wish fulfillment, it’s fascinating if unpersuasive; as a vision of its subject—high-school life—it’s as faux-sweet and faux-innocent as the films of the Frankie Avalon era.

Despite the deftness of the graft (thanks to a script that he co-wrote with Gillian Flynn), it remains, throughout, a graft—a conspicuous effort to rely on the simple emotional engagement of a crime drama to deliver didactic observations about political power relations.

Its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.