“‘Year of the Dragon’ offers little comfort, and when it does, Cimino heavily suggests its victories are hollow and insincere. It is a dark-mirror exercise in genre fragmentation that shatters the vigilante cop thriller into thousands of pieces and lays its ugliest instincts frighteningly bare.”
“Spaces are key to Lumet’s vision of the justice system; the ideas that bind it together must play out in physical spaces, and in them, Lumet finds the embodiment of all its flaws and virtues.”
“Some of Avildsen’s men turn to violence. Some of them turn to crime. Some of them turn inward. All of them know that somehow, some way, they must turn. They cannot survive, let alone win, without surrendering some part of themselves.”
“For Paul Schrader, First Reformed’s visual style realizes ideas of transcendental style that he first theorized at the beginning of his career. But that style only works because it serves the story and character he crafted so carefully.”
“‘BlacKkKlansman,’ fairly or not, will be judged as Lee’s ‘comeback’ movie. He never really left, of course.”
“‘The Blue Gardenia’ occupies a curious space inside noir. In many ways, it acts as an indirect response to many of the films that preceded it, with their icy femmes fatales…”
“As a largely disregarded noir B-side, ‘Pushover’ deliberately recalls its more famous predecessor, playing upon audience expectations of MacMurray’s screen persona to create an experience of déjà vu.”
“Blowback occurs when policymakers fail to take into account the far-reaching ramifications of their actions.”
“‘Red Sparrow’ is no feminist masterwork — far from it. However, in its depiction of a male world full of predators — a patriarchal system constructed to oppress, exploit and then discard women — perhaps it offers a valuable first step towards that badly needed change.”
“Above all, Argento is a visual and aural stylist, and the style that would carry him into his later films deepens here, with flourishes of freewheeling experimentation.”
