Andrew Schenker

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.