Jaime N. Christley

Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.

Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.

The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.

The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.

David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.

What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.

The lightning in the film’s bottle isn’t some generic feel-good humanism, but a complicated one, fighting for its own existence, sometimes angry, sometimes despondent.

In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.

The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.

The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.