You are Harry fucking Houdini.

Man, they really didn't leave anything on the cutting room floor. I understand movies are just longer now and there's nothing to be done about it, but this really feels its length.

The dialogue scenes are so drawn out as to lose their weight, while the heist sequences are largely left unexplained. It makes the visual language sometimes difficult to follow, even if what we piece together is happening is exhilarating. The diamond center heist…

The rare case of a movie where I care about the characters and am engaged in the visuals, but simply wait and wait for the film itself to pull me in and it never does.

The climactic husband scene is surely the best of the movie, but by that point I was nearly nodding to sleep. The movie alienates its audience just as much as this grand metropolis does for its characters. It makes the time feel like it's flying…

You know, you're kind of an asshole

Man, you know you've got an incredible catalog when they can make a 135-minute movie about the first five years of your career and it's basically all just songs.

Truly such little story here propelling the plot. The only thing keeping us going is figuring out which Bob Dylan classic is coming next. The narrative tension does pick up in the 1965 chapter for obvious reasons, though even the Newport framing is awkward…

Now I've asked you forty different ways and it's time you come up with a fresh answer.

There is a reason this movie is so achingly conventional. Because it still works.

The literal inspiration for WALK HARD, this is tragic and invigorating, often at the same time. It's not about Johnny Cash making the music, but about what is behind the music, allowing us to buy into that cliche childhood foundational trauma because it is exactly that, foundation for the…

Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!

Man.

This starts so excitingly, with John Turturro's antic playwright sent to Hollywood to write for the pictures. Surely, hijinks must follow! And they do, but this specific brand of Coen Brothers abstraction (peeling wallpaper, mosquito buzzing, repeated identical hallway shots), never quite reaches the heights of their 90s classics.

Though, right when you start to feel that sense creeping in, they take this movie in such a shocking…

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

The spoilery tagline for this sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction. But what we actually get is a complex and harrowing story of a moral quandary. It's a story of violence that is not violent. It is a story of a maybe-good person who may have done a bad thing,…

I'll date his brains out! </em?

Has some of the funniest bits in recent comedic film history (not tough competition), including naked Jennifer Lawrence beating people on the beach, an accidental punch in the face at a high school party and about half a dozen other sight gags from JLa. This is a genre she belongs in, with her knack for physical comedy and pitch-perfect timing.

But when this movie swerves into dramatic stakes, and turns into a story about…

Because you let us

This is such an interesting remake. For 75%, it's almost shot by shot identical to the Danish version from just two years ago. And then it veers away from the source text and almost completely changes genres, from horror to thriller.

What made the original so thrilling was its abstraction, that we had little idea the motives of the host family. This, in classic Hollywood fashion, makes the unsaid explicit. And this gives us a final…

Ethan, today is a day you’re gonna remember for a very long time, but if you handle it right, you’ll have a chance to forget it.

A really taut thriller with true star power that strains credulity at times, as it should, and ends maybe unsurprising generally, but with a genuinely surprising method of finale.

The car crash sequence will instantly enter this film into the action canon, which is somewhat unfortunate because that happens in the least interesting strand…