Jaime N. Christley

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.