Andrew Schenker

Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.

To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.

Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.

One is left wondering what exactly the now moldy "anything is possible" sentiments of our 44th president have to do with a music whose history and cultural meaning we've just spent the last two hours not learning nearly enough about.

Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.

Rather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.

The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy.

The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.

The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge.

It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.

Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.

Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.

Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.

A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.

This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.

While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere.

The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.

For all of the director's willingness to explore his characters' unexpected depths, he's still hamstrung by his perpetually tasteful cinema-of-quality aesthetic.

Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book.

Walks a fine line between empathetic treatment of its characters and voyeuristic freakshow gazing.

Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment.

Alternating between self-consciously offbeat comedy and existential J-horror, It's Me, It's Me never quite satisfies in either mode.

The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.

The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.

Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.

Essentially the film aims to trade in the awkwardness of teen sexuality, but too often settles for the gross-out gag instead.

For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.