Nick Newman

Even at a pace or two too long, while starting to coast on the pure rush of initial, stronger ideas, it’s perhaps his best-engineered work since The Village and arguably the purest piece of entertainment he’s ever made.

There’s no reason La Práctica––a handsome, funny, wisely melancholic film of just 95 minutes––should stand unseen, nor Martín Rejtman not be considered (however belatedly) a valuable asset in contemporary cinema (which he infrequently visits). As both introduction to and summation of his work: par excellence.

It takes a good stretch of precious screentime for Part Two to play as its own entity and not the serial continuation of a two-year-old film based on a 60-year-old property; it also takes a good stretch of precious screentime for Part Two to play as anything other than a thoroughgoing, checklist-meeting obligation bolstered by obvious craft.

The notable disappointment of this always-big, deft-enough, equal-parts compelling and lumbering work is its programmatic portrait of an operation we’re bluntly told changed humankind forever.

This movie has the greatest ratio of zone-out time to narrative comprehension I’ve ever experienced.

Though less a take-it-or-leave-it gauntlet-toss than Lana Wachowski’s more boldly experimental work, the virtues of her fourth Matrix are often in excess of anything she’s made since the polarizing-but-great sequels, sometimes in contradiction to the matter of us even watching it—a work about the fact that it almost should not exist.

The Card Counter’s powers linger well past plot machination—its methods of approaching incident miles deeper than how they’ll play, its pauses in conversation bruising harder than anything spewed. I’m smitten with his latter-day tone-setter vibe, the stumbles amusing (I’m curious who got that horrific music into key scenes) and indulgences almost touching.

The exposition-mountain screenplay leaves little to feel just as a devotion to the written word leaves scant room for anything to look at. I’m slightly unsure what anybody involved was hoping to get from the experience, much less what’s the takeaway sans basic admiration for baseline craft.

A well-modulated vision of the fight against encroaching malaise or mere trifle dressing itself up? Depends on the scene. But trifles have their place and auteurs should be allowed their fun, which On the Rocks deploys over 90 minutes kind enough not to feel like a waste of anyone’s talents or time.

Great concert films impose a directorial presence onto player and stage alike, but Lee and team seem more content to record.