It's a testament to the production design that one quickly gets caught up in the story without ever completely losing the "ooh-ahh" factor. Ominous, wall-to-wall music bolsters the appropriately uneasy mood, and the bittersweet conclusion is satisfying.

Full Review | Jul 22, 2008

The style doesn't just overwhelm the substance, it makes it irrelevant.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2007

For its retro-futurist look alone, this outdated thriller set in 2054 Paris is worth seeing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 3, 2006

Its dark images echo in the mind's eye. And for that alone, it's worth seeing.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 12, 2006

An empty experience; lots of shadow and noise, adding up to very little.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 6, 2006

It's unfortunate that it's all in the service of a story as dull as it is complicated, though if you can make it to the end without drifting off, there is a small reward.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 6, 2006

Undone by a plot that is ridiculously hard to follow and hackneyed.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 29, 2006

A comic book -- mint condition, double-bagged -- that leaves you impressed only with its pristine hollowness.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 29, 2006

This chiaroscuro thriller is more visually arresting than narratively convincing, and as the police procedural unfolds, what might have been a sly cautionary tale, a la this summer's A Scanner Darkly, becomes merely procedural.

| Sep 28, 2006

Renaissance is more than mere eye candy. It sneaks into deeper, darker places - a dream world of shadowy menace.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 28, 2006

With its halfhearted script, stiff performances and overlong running time, this is the kind of movie that's simultaneously dazzling to look at, and increasingly tough to sit through.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 22, 2006

Renaissance is a dark joy to inhabit once you jettison the idea of a satisfying narrative.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 22, 2006

Renaissance's failures as a boffo genre exercise pale next to its achievements as a piece of moving pop art.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 22, 2006

The grim, dystopian world in this animated French film is the product of a computer technique that evokes the sharp, linear style of a graphic novel.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 21, 2006

[Director] Volckman's vision, however unrelentingly monochromatic, does just enough with 'motion capture' to persuade you that it could tell substantive, even provocative grown-up stories.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 21, 2006

No one will be talking about the movie's banal plot, the trite dialogue, or any of the indistinguishable characters who offer a bleak futuristic vision of cinema that's all style, no soul.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 20, 2006

It's film noir, with too much noir for its own good.

Full Review | Sep 19, 2006

Certainly one of the year's more luscious releases, offering not just the sleekest car chase but the most romantic of rainstorms.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2006

The superfluous story is so muddled that it becomes a pesky distraction from the proceedings' graphical virtuosity.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 15, 2006

The film jumps cheerfully into every hard-boiled movie clich¨¦ like a child splashing into puddles.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 1, 2006