Andrew Schenker

Fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles, remaining content with simplistic conclusions about pro-Putin thuggery.

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

3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.

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

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.

All of this could be very funny, but while the film does deliver some strong comic turns, far too much time is spent watching an inactive Kofman whining about his lot.

This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.

A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.

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.

Alternating between self-consciously offbeat comedy and existential J-horror, It's Me, It's Me never quite satisfies in either mode.

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.

Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.

When Diana's fixations begin to take over, Fidell seems ill-prepared to steer the film into strictly psychological territory, resulting in a project that loses its fraught sense of control at the same moment as its embattled protagonist.

Enjoyment of Jeff Kaplan's film will vary given your capacity to simultaneously laugh and wink at the hijinks of two of the least palatable characters to share screen time in recent years.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.

When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?

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

The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.

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.

At the center of the film, festering like an open sore, is the stereotype of the psycho lesbian bitch.

Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.

Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.