Ben Kenigsberg

The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.

Provocative as the film is, it doesn’t fully reconcile Tsemel’s contradictions, if such a thing were even possible or desirable.

There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.

There is no mystery about who wins the movie’s final bout, but it is never less than thrilling to watch Yen’s fluttering limbs in action.

If the 2019 Black Christmas is not nearly as chilling as the original, it is genuinely barbed as gender satire, and it cleverly pre-empts obvious outrage.

It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.

Its primary interest lies in the tension between candid moments and shots that appear artfully composed.

It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.

After Parkland is not easy to watch, and certain choices (of images, of music) could be construed as calculated. But the movie succeeds where it counts: showing the reverberations of violence long after most cameras left.

The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.

This isn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings.

It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.

This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.

The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.

The real good liar is whoever convinced Mirren and McKellen to class up such thin and arbitrary material.

The movie can be frustratingly deferential toward Watson, but it is never less than urgent.

The individual stories have moments of power, but 16 Bars feels abbreviated. It only sometimes transcends its role as an awareness tool and reveals the texture and detail that long-term documentary filming can produce.

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.

While “The Apollo” itself might have taken a more inventive approach, it derives its power from the artistry it captures.

Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.

While the leads are credible, the filmmaking (including a hacky score) adds a sheen of macho familiarity to a narrative that was eerily matter-of-fact in doc form.

It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.

Farming is a mystery movie in which the author investigates himself — and doesn’t fully share the answers.

Time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity. Dialogue is sparse, and it takes some time for the threesome’s dynamic to come into focus, to the extent that it ever does.

The thesis of On the President’s Orders isn’t terribly original, but in a needlessly roundabout way, it makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top-down culture that stems from Duterte's assent.

It seems best to view Serendipity as one component of a much bigger project (a book on Nourry’s work with the same title was published in 2017) — a body of work in which life and art are inseparable.

Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.