jameslucas

In 1996, Boyle’s playfulness and Hirakubo’s smart, staccato editing could have been sufficient to make up for a story shorn of heft in translation from novel to screen. Thirty years later, the thinness is inescapable.

Each scene feels like a little experiment, and the consistent tempo and warm simplicity gives the viewer room to approach each new moment with faith that it will delight or be over soon.

This telling of one of the most significant acts of journalism makes it seems like the protagonists were publishing months of stories without any direct quotes, and the ending feels entirely arbitrary.

This is a tour de force of the locked-room construction, but the central narrative around sentient A.I. is undercut by the too easily attained mistakeable-for-human vessels.

Finally: a movie that reminds us that the real evil is the lazy architecture we make along the way.

I love that a movie of this boldness and specificity of vision exists for the segment of humanity it speaks to, even if I’m not of their number.

The Splash Mountain of movies. The pinnacle of color-by-number entertainment.

Great action scenes, terrible CGI, and 50% too many story ideas. Every now and then the story reminds us that WWIII is at hand and we appreciate the reminder because it is otherwise forgotten.

One irritatingly improbable coïncidence is a blemish on this otherwise excellent elevation of the desparate-guy-turns-to-crime-and-does-it-so-well-bad-guys-won’t-let-him-walk-away trope.

The main release is effective but broad and saccharine. The Minus Color edit is superior. Exposition and emotion that feels childish in color feels dramatic in black-and-white.

I want all emo films be as sharp and snappy as ‘Frances Ha’ and all pitiable protagonists to be as rounded and lovable as Frances.

Creepiness and cruelty are used to plug every hole where cleverness is conspicuously absent. Barker seems to know he’s shortchanging us because the lovespell induces unrelated ‘Ring’-girl movements that serve only as distraction from the moral dilemma going unanswered.

It’s smart, funny, and fresh, but what really gives life to ‘This Thing’ is the plethora of brilliantly written not-quite-essential moments that bestow depth and realism upon the throughline.

An unapologetic High Art film, Resurrection is often thin on accessible story but is nearly always rich with visual delight, including a staggering bounty of long takes.

The first third of this three-story anthology offers two thirds of the wit and intrigue. Cookie chicken FTW.

‘U’ relies on cameos from ‘Inc.’ to bolster its comparatively wobbly story, but it’s a pleasant diversion that does no harm to its parent work.

DaCosta’s horror pedigree fits this chapter, but the absence of Boyle’s bold visual experimentation leaves Garland’s lean story feeling thin. Fiennes’s performance is 70% of the propulsion.

We spend enough timing looking at Tatum looking **** to know that the writers know that this is a tragedy, but they keep the machine in comedy mode until so late that the transition is maximally uncomfortable.

The humor—intended or otherwise—doesn’t come fast enough to put this in proper parody territory, but it’s not anything else.

A pleasant little mess. Many clever scenes, some of which work toward the whole. Greta Lee is excellent for all 2½ minutes she gets.

The heavy expositional dialogue and the fake German accents suggest that Ron Howard stalled out in the nineties.

Excellent acting and score keep ‘Aftersun’ on the happy side of ambiguous, but it’s hard not to see it as a ‘Somewhere’ in which Sofia Coppola’s gift for painting with the fewest strokes is replaced with blind faith in the Kuleshov effect.

Marty Supreme has loud parts and soft parts, tense parts and introspective parts, but it has no pause, slow down—just go, faster, now.

The third act drags and a few elements have aged terribly (“I know your Social Security number!” ), but The Apartment’s nuance and continued relevance are remarkable for a film of the Hays Code era.

Park has things to say about alcoholism AND the folly of dignity being tied to work AND marital fidelity AND automation and non-biological parentage AND autism (I think?) AND the exploitation of the natural world.

Forty-five minutes of cool, creepy setup. Forty-five of slow realization that the film’s boring-ass commentary on adolescence is the only payoff.

The story and dialogue are so performative that they might or might not work on stage. In the medium of film it is impossible to find anything recognizable as humanness in the caricatures Panahi mistakes for characters.

Has there ever been a movie so undermined by its catastrophic final minutes? The ending is poorly constructed that I was briefly convinced the credits would prove to be a gotcha before the real ending was revealed.

The lo-fi æsthetic is effective at knitting together disparate points in time without unnecessarily differentiating the moment from the memory, but a bluntly repetitive first act puts Chronology into a momentum deficit it never recovers from.

The Whole Bloody Affair is good by virtue of having great source material, but it is a poorer experience than the original two-volume presentation, largely due to its painfully long running time.

The Secret Agent is beautiful and compellingly acted, and its loose construction proves adept at holding all the messy real-life details the film faithfully preserves.

100 minutes of joy. Nothing original in the plot, nothing great about the score, nothing illuminating in the cinematography. Just a joyous story told smartly and accessibly. Hikari knows which clichés most need avoiding, and she and Fraser know when to let his face to do the talking.

Josh O’Connor has the shoulders to carry any movie, but most of us are coming to see Benoit Blanc go toe-to-toe with this all-star cast of suspects, and ‘Dead Man’ delivers precious little of that.

Trier knows exactly which dots not to connect. ‘Sentimental Value’ leaves itself open for contemplation without ever feeling willfully withholding.

A couple plot threads seem to exist just to give the stacked cast enough to do, but mostly Jay Kelly is an admirably delicate mediation on acting and **** and who pays the costs thereof.

With a small cast, a four-room set, and monologues galore, Blue Moon could have been a stage play devoid of life on the screen, but Linklater and Hawke make it crackle with discomfort and hilarity from beginning to end.

Most of the movie ensconces the viewer between a tapestry of lucid, vital cinematography and a wall of the rarest acting. It’s stingy with narrative arc, which makes the comparatively focused ending all the more of an emotion wallop.

The story feels like a first draft, but the vibe is perfect (at least when we aren’t “behind the scenes”).

‘Ares’ is a popcorn flick with an uncluttered script, a cool look, and a bananas-good soundtrack. Leto delivers an unexpectedly warm and appealing performance. That it doesn’t bother to pretend to make sense should be refreshing.

Like last year’s Nosferatu, Frankenstein relies too heavily on meticulous retro æsthetics to justify spending over two hours on a lifeless pre-Victorian tale.

Linklater knows that he’s providing all the ingredients that forecast fiasco, which permits him to allow the the lack of story to *be* the story. (The story is Abed?)

Impeccable acting and direction keep the stress level in the 5–9 range for the whole of this nearly two-hour film. There are brilliant moments, but maybe not enough to merited such a taxing experience.

Will Patton’s reading is magnetic, but the narration is still the little kernel of artifice that pulls the viewer back from total immersion in this gorgeous, heartbreaking experience.

The nearly exposition-free development of the two protagonists would be graceful were it not for stupendously poor editing. Time and again I found myself frantically scanning a beautifully composed shot, unable to tell if it exists to develop Wong’s luscious vision of 1960s Hong Kong or if it includes a meaningful narrative detail.

The second half’s examination of systemic corruption has a decided eat-your-spinach vibe, particularly after the crisp and lively procedural that is the first half, but the whole movie works on the back of technical mastery of the highest order.

‘The Baltimorons’ takes a simple story, a small cast, and an unglamorous city and absolutely glows with grace and humor. It’s a little movie and one of the great Christmas tales of this century.

‘Encounters’ is less a story than it is a carnival ride Spielberg built to use the latest and greatest in special effects. The early scene with Truffaut and Balaban in India is the only one that remains as effective as I found the movie as a whole thirty years ago.

‘One Battle’ excites with its kineticism, but it’s lacking substance at its core. Bob’s bravery in the face of tangible danger barely makes him a protagonist worthy of our support, and the villains’ readiness to kill seems to stem less from understandable motive and more from a need for the audience to be certain of their villainy.

‘Anemone’ looks good. It sounds amazing. And mostly it feels like a very green director trying to use all his Really Cool Scene ideas in one go.

‘Eddington’ succeeds for much of its considerable runtime thanks to its empathy for its broken protagonist, but it falters when it swaps that empathy for what feels like a Yorgos Lanthimos story minus the humor.