“It wouldn’t be surprising to see ‘The Traitor’ filed in the Dad-canon of crime cinema alongside other European films like ‘Mesrine’ or ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ — films where the context is too wide to sufficiently cover…”
“‘Semper Fi’ leans heavily on male codes of honor — a la HBO’s ‘The Wire’ or Ben Affleck’s ‘The Town’ — but doesn’t fully explore the motivations for the primary players, a group of Marines trying to re-acclimate to life in upstate New York. As a result, the final act suffers.”
“Shaping the narrative around the complexities of female friendship and the pressures wrought by the financial crisis of 2008, Scafaria convincingly paints a psychologically resonant portrait that allows the viewer a seat on the inside looking out…”
“Nothing about ‘Ford v Ferrari’ reeks of studio interference, perhaps owing to the fact that the script hews so closely to screenwriting conventions that worked well for decades.”
“A collaboration between a Chinese-American director and a Korean-American writer, ‘Coming Home Again’ is an exemplar of minimal styling that shows that what is essentially human surpasses the boundary of what is ethnic and cultural.”
“Johnson loves whodunits so much that he racked his brain to think 10 steps ahead of the audience so that he could hoodwink them to serve the goal of establishing the genre’s viability in the present day, all while staying true to its classic roots.”
“‘It Chapter Two’ ends up as a self-conscious adolescent that nervously giggles any time it’s on the verge of doing something profound; a cringe-inducing ‘no homo’ walk-back writ large to avoid accusations of nastiness or tenderness.”
“For a story that engages with tough, thorny questions of redemption and reconciliation, it’s a welcome development to have a filmmaker look upwards, not inwards.”
“Esterhazy’s direction is consistently flat and uninspired given the nonstop opportunities for twisted weirdness, but the failure of ‘The Banana Splits Movie’ can be pinned almost entirely on the sawdust-packed script…”
“While ‘High Flying Bird’ may seem uneven at first glance, one has to appreciate that Soderbergh directly addresses controversial societal topics that always touch a nerve in America.”
