Andrew Schenker

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.

High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.

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

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.

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

Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.

While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters.

Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.

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

For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.

In Jay and Mark Duplass's film, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued.

The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.

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

A cursory history lesson with no interest in probing the deeper or more complex implications of Mandela's positions and their relationship to his country's shifting landscape.

Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.

A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse.

It's hard to say which is worse: the unfunny caricatures or the indulgent soul-searching.

The modern-day sections with Mariel Hemingway, while detailing the redemptive promise of the title, too often come across as either indulgent time-filler or overflow with PSA-level superficiality.

Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates and, despite their unimaginative employment, they stand as something of a rebuke to the film's dominant images.

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.

Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."