Andrew Schenker

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.