Vice

What is perhaps most remarkable about Bale's and Adams's performances is that they supply depth and nuance to a film whose director appears to have had no appetite for either quality.

Despite this ongoing fishing analogy, it never actually manages to land the big fish.

When a movie's premise is that its subject single-handedly moulded recent history, you want more depth and grandeur than this one provides.

Bale credited "Satan" for inspiration for the role, and it shows.

These days, everyone is yelling, and that includes the makers of Vice. The title has a double-meaning but I'd suggest a third: watching the film feels like having your head stuck in a...

You would struggle to find many nuances in Bale's performance, but this is a grand example of what Orson Welles used to call "King acting".

It has very little unique insight to share, and the various styles in which it attempts to convey what it does have comes off as either misplaced or pretentious.

With its inconsistent tones and struggles to maintain a steady pace in its storytelling, less is revealed about his actual legacy (than audiences already knew) versus the filmmaker’s disdain for the protagonist.

McKay falls short of his fascinating attempt to both satirize and humanize Cheney.

It’s a textbook example of how bad things can go when you have such rotten tone management and a dogged fixation on your message that smothers your storytelling and character building.