Even without the usual monster mano-a-mano, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo does not lack for action, offering plenty of animated eye candy in the form of the usual big ships, impossibly futuristic technology and a pleasing, purple-heavy color palette. [23 Jan 2014]
The viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.
As with a concert or favorite record, sometimes it's best not to overthink things but simply let the visceral power take over. That is what made Queen and Freddie Mercury so special and that is why Bohemian Rhapsody will rock you, if you let it.
Rohrwacher’s work unites a passionate interest in social realism, in the hardships faced by people on the streets and in the fields, with a daring refusal to be held by the rules of narrative realism.
Often, a scene-survey doc that takes on so much — cultural history, present-day portraiture, regional distinctions, celebrity interviews, fly-on-the-wall reportage — can play as scattershot. That’s not so with United Skates. Round and round it flows — why not jump on in?
Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.
I’ll be straight with you: This movie is awful. And not the fascinating, Alexander Nevsky (the action star/filmmaker, not the 13th-century prince) kind of awful — it’s the does-anybody-involved-know-what-the-hell-they’re-doing kind of awful.
It’s a Rocky movie, just the latest go-round, its story more formulaic, its people less specific, its rhythms as wheezily familiar as a workout you should have changed up weeks ago. It’s a diminishment of Creed, a dumbing down, just as Rocky II was a diminishment of Rocky.
The best I can say about Buster Scruggs is that it seems as though the Coens picked their favorite actors and wrote them a part specifically tailored to their abilities.
