“With ‘Daniel Isn’t Real,’ Mortimer stands by his choices and doesn’t wobble. The result is a film that’s harmonious and undiluted, if prickly and divisive.”
“Who is going to argue with the casting of Tom Hanks? Even so, the reason I don’t care for most fictionalized biopics lies in the imitation of one well-known person by another.”
“‘The Witch’ may be the superior film, but ‘The Lighthouse’ shows Eggers growing by leaps and bounds as a storyteller and visual stylist.”
“From the moment Ramona first appears, ‘Hustlers’ announces itself as a new addition to the neo-noir cannon — a film about bright lights in dark places.”
“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.”
