The album offers a musical experience in which dark emotions become sublimated through rousing power pop.
The album sacrifices conventionality for weirder, wider possibilities.
The album encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster during the most turbulent of ages.
The purpose behind the album is unmistakably sincere, but the singer isn’t able to make the songs much his own.
The album may well be the most accessible entry in frontman Neil Hagerty’s vast catalogue.
The album is less a revealing personal statement than a change of palette.
The film’s avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism.
Robert Pollard is still coming up with new twists on his patented brand of anthemic power pop.
The film doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.
In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.
The film struggles to both honor and redeem the past before everything comes to a close.
The film is too irreverent in tone and narrow in scope to place Roger Ailes’s criminality in a larger, more meaningful context.
Individual scenes are set to the rhythm of the young women’s conversations, which at times approach Gilmore Girls-level warp speed.
Most of the album’s songs blend into each other so nebulously that they become collectively anonymous.
Haynes discusses how the film quietly continues some of his aesthetic trademarks and thematic concerns.
Haynes’s film intermittently hits upon a few original ways of representing its ripped-from-the-headlines mandate.
All the feminist virtue-signaling in the world can’t conceal the film’s creative conservatism.
Much of the power of this set is in the band’s ability to imbue their songs with new dimensions.
Many of the album’s best moments find the band in near-prog terrain.
The film is good enough to redeem the bad taste that lingered from its predecessors but too uninspired to make one want more.