Andrew Schenker

This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.

Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.

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

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.

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.

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

If you've ever seen Psycho, or even if you know anything at all about the film, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock would like to congratulate you on your savvy.

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.

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.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.

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.

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.

Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.

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.

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.

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

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.

The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots.

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

Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.

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

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

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'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.

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

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.

Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.

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.

Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.

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.

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

While the male characters are certainly not presented as models of enlightened behavior, their antics and crises are indulged in a manner not extended to their female counterparts.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.

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

Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it.

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.

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.

Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.

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.

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

Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."

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.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.

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

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.

The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?

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 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.

Although the film is essentially contemplative, there’s little here worth contemplating.

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

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

A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.

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

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

For a film that had once made some pretense toward exposing such dangerously submissive attitudes toward Hollywood romance, Friends with Benefits's conclusion can't help but seem more than a wee bit disingenuous.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.