Andrew Schenker

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.