Rob Humanick

Despite the subdued anger and drawn-out suffering on display, the documentary is primarily a work of hope.

A knowing mélange of recognizable genre tropes bordering on shopworn cliché, with little else introduced to the equation to justify its existence.

The film is spare, empathic, and deeply introspective, and its imagery, such as a pelican fascinated by its own reflection, is so sublime in its kookiness as to be worthy of Werner Herzog.

By modestly embracing its inherent minimalism and finding the emotions underlying even the most schematic of scenarios, the film taps into something unmistakably human.

By formally acknowledging the material's inherent silliness ad nauseam, the filmmakers have distanced themselves from the spirit of the parody, robbing it of its gruesome pleasures.

The film is at once enabled and hindered by its utter strangeness, an intrinsic quality surely exacerbated in its English-language release.

The doc does a good job of avoiding partisan caterwauling, limiting its argument to a clear thesis and well-articulated supporting statements.

In the end, any and all potential B-movie fun is extinguished by Ragnarok's depressingly listless anonymity.

The film fluctuates haphazardly between semi-serious reverence and tongue-in-cheek camp, with no shortage of opportunities for the inevitable Rifftrax accompaniment.

Beholden to the same plethora of taboos, half-truths, and outright lies traded en masse by mainstream conservatism for the last seven years.

It rarely feels like anything more than an effort to pander to the kind of audiences that enjoy Quentin Tarantino's films for all the wrong reasons.

By de-emphasizing politics in favor of humanitarianism, Danielle Gardner's work also suggests how Americans might yet unify even as the world around them threatens to tear itself apart.

The documentary's refusal to challenge the comfort zones of its target audience is apparent throughout.

Throughout the film, writer-director Jash Hyde avoids Paul Haggis's patronizing white liberal attitude toward class warfare.

This is a powerful chapter in our human history, but it's made melodramatic and dull through Matej Minac's indulgence of hokey reenactments and sound-augmented archival footage.

The film employs a flashy text-and-graphics aesthetic that immediately brings to mind the satirical undercurrent of a Grand Theft Auto video game.

Despite the multitude of cinematic tricks the prolific Andrew Lau has up his sleeve, the film is a disappointingly rote entry in the wuxia pantheon.

The convoluted mockumentary setup indicates that this is all meant to be taken as a meta exercise in Hollywood-insider rib-nudging, although the proceedings rarely rise to the occasion.

Something of a textbook example of the perfect crowd-pleaser, Kurosawa’s tale is sociopolitical wish fulfillment via archetypal samurai drama, albeit with a twist or three.

Children’s films have often been more unsettling, but few, if any, exceed The Fox and the Hound for quietly bitter honesty. Its modesty is unsurpassed, and thanks to it, we’ve been spared its inclusion in the theme-park side of Disney culture.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is as enduring a classic as has ever come out of Hollywood, and arguably among the greatest, but the film is admittedly not without its share of rough spots.

The final passages are the most exultant in their taking us beyond ourselves into a wide-eyed state of untarnished possibilities; entirely without words, the film reminds us that, despite how far we’ve come, the real odyssey has only just begun.

The film is virtually perfect: Nary a frame goes to waste in the establishment and development of plot and character, with the occasionally deviant touch serving to neutralize a sense of overly manufactured calculation.

Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don’t need to be in the know to relish Scorsese’s mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are.

A romance, a western, and a totem to lost youth in an era ravaged by infection and addiction, it’s a high-water mark in a decade filled with exemplary genre fare. Borrowing from, and surpassing, the exceptional chemistry of Aliens’s tightly knit cast, the melancholic Near Dark is gorgeous even in its savagery, and one of pulp cinema’s greatest achievements.

Anti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield.