Philip Seymour Hoffman

Radiating serpentine self-absorption, Philip Seymour Hoffman embodies a youthful Truman Capote.

A thrill ride, and a gripping one: plausibility-straining, predictable at times, but pulse-pounding all the same.

A Bizarro-world Frank Capra picture...Though the story deserves more weight...still a pleasing, unusually smart, consistently witty mass entertainment.

Good to the last drop: the guilt-drenched final line is a prism revealing new facets of character and theme to ponder on the way out of the theater.

Hoffman’s actorly sensibility allows the film’s best moments, expressed in gestures and non-verbal signifiers...

The Master begs for a reorientation of the viewer, perhaps requiring more than one viewing...there's nothing easy or conventional about this account of a doomed search for external meaning, doubling as a meditative tone poem on human frailty.

A competent sequel...The Hunger Games could be fairly accused of being what it satirizes, but it's not without a thought in its deadly little head.

If the franchise continues to feel a bit dull—heavy on the drama and light on the excitement, with pageantry long in the rear-view—there’s a respectable purity in the films’ political cynicism and populist fervor.