I can’t tell if Matthew McConaughey’s performance shows great restraint or if this is the extent of his serious acting abilities, but the balance is perfect for this movie.

What more appropriate way to describe the difficulty of making it as a starving artist than with a protagonist who’s hard to like?

There’s an off-kilter aura about the characters, and their actions are almost surreal; unfortunately, Ridley Scott restricts the actors and scenery to the blandly realistic. He foists logic upon a world intended to be chaotic.

The story awkwardly dawdles between depicting the status quo and progressing the plot; the two look so similar that it becomes a confusing task for us to figure out where the movie is going and why.

An enormous cast of celebrities irreverently reminds us that actors are people too, and often much worse. The apocalypse is not for the faint of heart.

A melodramatic script handled poorly by both director and cast doom this movie to such abysmal depths as a thesaurus can hardly capture.

“Django Unchained” is one of the best movies of the year, but more because of Quentin Tarantino’s ability to create cinematically interesting moments than because of an intelligent, fully realized story.

“The Master” has a reputation of being “about” Scientology, but it really isn’t; Paul Thomas Anderson uses the notorious religion more as a placeholder for cult mentality in general, calling it out for tricking those most vulnerable.