Andrew Schenker

Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.

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.

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.

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."

Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.

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

Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.

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.

Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than offerings like 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening.

What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.

Amardeep Kaleka's documentary often seems like little more than preaching-to-the-converted, New Age drivel.

Mukunda Michael Dewil's film has the makings of a taut little thriller, but the writer-director has the twin disadvantages of needing to include dialogue and to rely on the services of Paul Walker to embody his protagonist.

Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.

The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots.

A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.

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

Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.

The Details is as smug and self-satisfied as its privileged lead character.

Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.

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

Mark Steven Johnson's Killing Season is a hard movie to take seriously, which is particularly unfortunate since it deals with such weighty issues as genocide, the ethical compromises that everyone makes in combat, and the lingering effects of wartime decisions on participants years down the line.

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

Unsurprisingly for a film detailing terminal disease, this is a largely solemn affair, often verging on morbidity in its elongated deathwatch.

The film speeds ahead with almost gleeful disinterest in dealing with the narrative challenges it sets up before resolving them in the most perfunctory ways imaginable.

A safe, laugh-free exercise that gets to have its fun, such as it is, because it's all in the service of the most conservative notions of domestic normality.

What most rankles about the film is the way that its insistence on paternal instincts as the principal signifier of male adulthood leads it to sanction the most childlike behavior of all.

Mostly the movie's varied storylines cough up the same platitudes: being pregnant sucks, having young children is a misery, but it's all worth it when you're holding that newborn in your arms.