Chris Barsanti

Daniel Roher’s modern noir has an appealing cleverness and lightness of touch.

At some point before the truncated-seeming finale, the film is just chasing its own tail.

Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.

Like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, the film never finds the right groove.

Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend.

Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.

The film’s ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of its protagonist’s world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him.

This is a finely observed and good-natured piece of work that carries some of the creative angst of Bradley Cooper’s other films but without the need to convince us of its main character’s genius.

Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.

Smith brings a tone of melancholy to the closing stretches of “Devo,” acknowledging in some way that all revolutions fade and mass cultural subversion will only ever work up to a point. But there is also a lack of sentimentality or resume-burning here, which feels of a piece with the band’s spiky posture and protest mentality.