Marshall Shaffer

“Tony” remarkably manages to embrace and eschew the revisionist strain of “Great Man” biopics, which have attempted to work around cradle-to-grave formulas ripped from Wikipedia by homing in on an illustrative incident in the subject’s life. Knowing there’s more cake is not necessary for the slice to fulfill its mandate to be sufficient and satisfying. It’s plenty sweet as is.

Even if the film consists primarily of reheated material, the cast and crew still know how to make it feel warm and welcoming.

Unidentified ranks among a rare class of movies that forces viewers to re-interpret everything they’ve just seen once the full picture locks into place. Whether that makes everything that came before worthless or worth it may be less a reaction to al-Mansour’s filmmaking and more of a reflection of the audience’s own subject position.

There’s a great evisceration of Hollywood in here that gets a bit too buried until sentimental schmaltz.

Cal McMau’s Wasteman illustrates why a powerful paradox about prisons makes them such a popular staging ground for psychodramas.

It’s easy enough to admire the evident technical merits, yes, but difficult to find any element that invites a viewer into the specific, soulful experience of the characters. As The Death of Robin Hood circles the obvious ending, the main point of reflection it invites is the missed opportunity to flesh out this world with a level of detail on par with its ambitions.

The film functions best when Anthony Maras reflects his protagonist's nature: straightforward, unflashy, and mission-driven.

The Samurai and the Prisoner offers a master class in framing and blocking, with Kurosawa Kiyoshi continually finding new ways to render the story’s self-contained setting as a source of rich visual pleasure.

[Kreutzer] might have served Gentle Monster better by narrowing her focus to a pure character study. But one hardly has to squint to find those elements in the film. They’re present every time Kreutzer trains the camera on Seydoux and lets her demonstrate why she’s among cinema’s finest working actresses.

Obsession’s big set-piece sequences are as chilling in their effect as they are confident in their execution.