What's going on in Kazakhstan?! Not a rhetorical question — I'm very ill-informed on this subject — but, just like Darezhan Omirbaev's Student, there are blunt lectures on Darwin and social Darwinism, with unsubtle overtones for the movie's depiction of high school bullying taking the form of older boys shaking down kids for cash. In this vision of Kazakh society, the only choice you have is who to get exploited by, because someone's inevitably going to screw you. Shots are…

That's a very grudging three stars, because — like Flight — there's more to chew on than I initially realized, but I still think it's kind of a crappy movie. Let me count the ways:

1) The first third in particular wore me down. I exceedingly dislike the way Bigelow transforms 7/7, the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombing and the bombing of Camp Chapman into standard suspense setpieces (when will that explosive go off?). The latter particularly rubbed the wrong way:…

I might have more to say about this at another time, or not; I'm really not a Malick expert. For now:

1) Well, at least they're not rolling around in the grass all the time now. Malick's self-calcification into a certain set of tics (communal voiceover aside) seems to have been broken with this film. Malick is famously interested in (or perceived as being interested in) Transcendence and Immanence on a large scale, but the emotions in To The Wonder…