Submission

A seriously considered film brimming with ideas worth examining.

Tucci and Timlin are both quite good in their roles, and writer-director Richard Levine (adapting Francine Prose's 2000 novel "Blue Angel") does an excellent job of slowly escalating the pair's relationship.

Honoring the primacy of language for his characters, Levine deftly reveals the ways they wield it to seduce, attack, manipulate, repress and, occasionally, to communicate.

At a time when modestly budgeted movies about human life beyond puberty are all but extinct, it shows us that here and there a heart remains beating.

For a movie addressing themes singularly suited to this moment, it's all the more disappointing when it whiffs those chances.

The film squanders some dramatic possibilities and has a truncated sense about it. We are left to wonder whether something went wrong with the script, or in the editing room, or both.

Submission lacks the insight and perspective to become a movie that represents "now." When the current cultural, political, and social climates are especially contentious, perhaps we need a movie that will address these issues head-on.

Submission is a fine film held back by a script full of convenient plot developments and flimsy writing; a cautionary tale for the consequences of men thinking with their junk too much

...viewers will most likely overlook the strong performances by stars Stanley Tucci and Addison Timlin and instead focus on the wasted opportunity to say something important about this moment in our time.

Submission might make itself useful as a mandatory instructional video for male professors; a "Scared Straight" for campus PhD's thinking about messing with nubile co-eds.

In the moment of #MeToo and #TimesUp, this tale of the relationship between an older male professor and his young female student is howlingly out of step and outrageously tone deaf. And that's on top of its tedious clichés.

Frustrating but sincere and well acted, especially by Tucci, who embodies a middle-aged man in transition, "Submission" explores well the risk associated with stepping out of one's comfort zone and shaking free from the stranglehold of mediocrity.