Andrew Schenker

Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.

Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley isn't only a study of the contemporary American university, but, like all of the filmmaker's best documentaries, a wide-ranging inquiry into the larger institutions and contradictions that define life in the United States.

Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.

A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.

A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.

In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.

Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.

Nothing is forced in Ryan Gielen's deceptively simple story, with the pressures bubbling forth as naturally as the good cheer that defines so much of the film.

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.

Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.

Shawn Levy's occasionally uproarious, warm-hearted comedy is about different generations educating each other, but it never seems rote.

Alejandro Landes's Porfirio is an ugly movie to watch, but it's not without purpose.

Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.

Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.

As Ridgen and Rossier take pains to point out, a man so rigorously committed to putting an end to oppression ought not be so easily dismissed, even if coming to grips with such a challenging figure may be finally as difficult as getting to the bottom of the Arab-Israeli conflict itself.

The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.

The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.

Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.

What emerges is a portrait of a fully committed band that could never quite make it and of the rock n' roll project as something between a (very serious) hobby and a full-time career.

The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.

The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.

It gives a true sense of how the forces of a hypocritically religious country has burdened countless young women with a lifetime of misplaced guilt.

Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.

The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.

There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.

Lynn Shelton crafts a film of astonishingly sustained mood, tying its beguiling atmosphere to the mental states of her characters.

James Marsh carries forward the mood and menace of the opening into the balance of the work, perfectly matching his aesthetic strategies to the story's shifting moral terrain.

It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.

A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.

A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."

Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.

Everado González isn't above capturing some striking landscape shots, seemingly for the shear desolate prettiness of it, but they always double as a reminder of the very real plight facing the subjects.

The film, lensed in appealing candy-striped colors, has so much fun exploding stereotypes and radiates with such infectious comic gusto and genuine good nature, that it would be almost churlish to resist its charms.

The film never lingers too long on any one thing, instead functioning as a survey in which several fascinating cultural moments are vividly evoked, but then left insufficiently probed.

Much of the film's final act is given to alienated walking, which too often plays as an abstract study of triangular arrangements in which non-speaking figures move across a barren terrain.

With the film, Melissa McCarthy definitively cements her status as a legitimate comic talent, leaving her co-star stumbling behind in her wake.

Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.

Dreams of a Life succeeds in making its point about the unkowability of the people in our lives, but there isn't quite enough substance here to fully sustain the film.

Given the film's early promise, it's unfortunate how it turns into a largely reductive Freudian character piece in which the main character has to come to terms with his old man.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.

The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.

Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.

As in Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's 2009 film, La Pivellina, modesty is the key to The Shine of Day, and sometimes to the detriment of audience involvement and focus.

It too often feels like just one more aesthetically uninspired documentary that gives way in the end to a special round of pleading for its specific cause.

It's occasionally too icily removed, but it compensates through its perpetual concern with understanding its characters and their untenable situations.

This decision to avoid treating the dinosaurs as surrogate people for easy identification is both the film's boldest move and the source of much of its problems.

The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.

An enormously effective piece of filmmaking, Incdendies unfolds as a series of eye-opening disclosures which Villeneuve plays as much for (admittedly enthralling) sensation as for any kind of wider-ranging inquiry, a questionable approach given the thorny nature of the material.

A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.

This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity.

The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.

Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.

As far as films about couples dealing with the female partner losing her mind go, Still Mine is pretty pedestrian.

Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.

Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.

Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.

The movie's understanding of how the group taps into people's deep need to believe ensures that the film remains not only fair-minded, but sensitive to the tortured emotions of its conflicted central characters.

The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.

Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.

The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.

If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.

The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama.

Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.

A nose-to-the-ground crime thriller that also doubles as a wide-ranging portrait of official corruption in the Philippines, On the Job has little trouble delivering the genre goods.

What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?

The film too often undercuts its goals by indulging its director's need for self-affirmation at the expense of the movie's far more compelling central subject.

A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.

As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.

Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Deonnie Yen Chan are too resourceful to let things remain dull for long.

Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.

The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.

In its refusal to bring an easy understanding to its main character's behavior, it comes dangerously close to presenting her as a willing perpetrator in her own victimhood.

The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another.

The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.

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

What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.

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.

The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.

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.

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

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

The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.

The film rarely takes us past its rather obvious conclusions about the potential bestial nature of kids and how that may translate to the larger battlefields.

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.

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.

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

This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.

Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.

Much of the film's attempted laughs come from the comedy-of-discomfort school, with an endless array of situations that milk awkwardness to a degree that makes these scenes far more unpleasant than humorous to watch.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.

Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.

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