Boyd van Hoeij

This is a sprawling yet intimate narrative, constructed almost entirely of in-between moments rather than the big turning points and tragedies.

Handsomely packaged, the film unfortunately is also too well-behaved and lacking in psychological depth to really set itself apart from countless other WWII dramas.

A mixture of raw, first-hand footage, shot by protesters themselves, and more self-possessed interviewees ensures that the chaos and sometimes lethal risks of protesting come across as strongly as the pressing sociopolitical reasons behind them and the effects the events have had on the participants.

The critique of those in power and their need to put down others — preferably foreign or different-looking people — in order to stay on top is as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. But like its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific.

Observant and wise about boys in puberty yet impish and carefree when necessary and never idealizing the cold and dreary countryside they travel through, Winter Flies is a lovely little film that’s as comfortable as an old sweater and almost as warm.

It is uncompromising filmmaking, certainly, but also insular filmmaking that will make a tiny little circle of intellectual cinephiles very happy while leaving everyone else — this critic included — completely cold.

The screenplay... seems to generally lack a throughline or focus, coasting from party scenes full of drugs and alcohol to work-related drama but rarely managing to get inside the head of the self-destructive character the designer had become by the 1970s.

Lafleur delivers an affecting, funny and eccentric -- in the best sense of the word -- meditation on that in-between state that people in their early twenties find themselves, as they are technically old enough to participate fully in all of life’s activities but they still lack the experience to know what they really want or what’s really good for them.

There's little in terms of the tension associated with police thrillers, but it's also not a socio-realist drama or a character study, instead echoing parts of these genres at different times so there's a constant sense of deja vu and reminders of other, better films without the material ever really coming into its own.

While the rapport between the middle-aged Paul and the thirtyish Alice is a fascinating give-and-take — they are essentially equals because one’s lack of experience is compensated for by the other’s lack of ideas — there is no real room for either to grow or be transformed. Their relationship, while full of exchanges, is finally quite stagnant.

Though the screenplay, based on Laurence Benaim’s biography, is all build-up and no payoff, there is just enough emotional insight to compensate for the lack of narrative fireworks in the last half-hour.

Nicloux is unable to instill the material with any tension.

Lolo has a solid laughs-per-minute rate and enough twists to overcome the occasional screenplay hiccup.

Schoenaerts is his usual, intense self, Exarchopoulos has here found her best role since Blue and there’s no denying their chemistry is wild. But their characters become prisoners of the many twists and turns of the narrative instead of rising above it; their personalities aren’t revealed through the story so much as they are constrained by it.

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

Though it contains some nice twists, the story is largely predictable and old-fashioned in ways both good (the characters’ unlikely come-what-may camaraderie) and bad (misogyny and machismo abound).

This unquestionably good-looking film, shot by world-class cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (The Drop, Bullhead), plays like a Low Countries-variation on the classy Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro, at least in terms of style if not substance, with what little narrative there is more of a clothesline for small-scale set pieces rather than a conduit for character insight.

The result feels like a dry and endless lecture more than an involving human story about serious issues. It’s a movie that’s all subtext and no text — and even the subtext struggles to make a point that’s more complex than a blunt truth.

The film’s main problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be and ends up not having enough time to develop anything in any depth.

It feels like a sermon delivered by an extremely cine-literate preacher.

It is unlikely that a lot of viewers come to see a Step Up film for convincing dialogue or psychological insight into a group of young things trying to make it big in a ruthless industry. But there’s barely any humor that doesn’t feel third-rate and most of the plot threads are so thin that All In occasionally feels like a satire of a dance film.

Recognizable human behavior is not this film’s forte -- which wouldn’t be a problem if something else would take its place but Punch never finds the right tone for the heterogeneous material, with sweetly melodramatic scenes alternating with high drama, some light action and farce.

What we are thus left with is a film that's made with an impressive level of craftsmanship but with exceptionally dubious politics, as if 21st-century moviemaking magic had been let loose on a terribly conservative and hopelessly blinkered 1980s relic of a script.

A more mature work from actor-director-producer Zach Braff that feels like a Garden State for grown-ups.

There is not a lot of risk-taking involved in the visual storytelling or in trying to find a cinematic equivalent of the novel’s style, making In Dubious Battle a rather classical period piece for the most part, though one with at least one very solid performance at its center.

The Players is an odd beast that, like all omnibus films, is only as strong as its weakest link.

The film remains stranded in a sort of genre no man’s land.

Because Sono tries to set the manga’s storyline, with its stylized violence, in the very real, post-earthquake/tsunami disaster area, Himizu struggles to find a coherent tone.

The lack of light irony, refined humor and spontaneity and freshness in the dialogue makes the film feel much more heavy-handed than a tale like this should be. For most of the nearly three-hour running time, it all plays as droningly serious, which makes the already long film feel much longer.

With a slick, outsider’s perspective on the City of Angels and some interesting possibilities that are set up early on, this Message gets off to a great start. But the screenplay becomes a muddle and then a mess in its second half.

This is the kind of indie doodle of a movie in which several potentially interesting ideas co-exist but never quite come together and where supporters will call the narrative "freewheeling" while naysayers will insist on "rambling."

The main problem is that the directors often struggle to assign meaning to their images that helps advance either the narrative or illuminate the emotional state of their main character.

There’s a sense that the goings-on are more quirky than comical.

Chastain is utterly convincing in another tough-as-nails role. If audiences stick with the movie, it's largely thanks to her movie-star charisma, which almost compensates for the increasingly ridiculous plot. Malkovich and Farrell seem to understand they are A-list talent in B-movie roles, and relish the opportunity.

Despite a slightly grating tendency to resist any kind of subtlety, the honest and convincingly played central romance does finally linger.

There’s certainly an overall sense of a formerly rich family’s fortunes dwindling, both economically and emotionally, but the three sections don’t add up to something more than the sum of their parts.

Part of the problem of Jacqueline (Argentine) is that it wants to be a film of many layers but Britto doesn’t have the know-how to keep each layer legible separately, with the final result feeling messy and impenetrable rather than admirably complex and, well, layered

Dante again smoothly combines moments of romantic and screwball comedy, schlocky genre elements and an overarching retro feel for this cute and pretty efficient zom com.

Cotillard, looking like one of the most glamorous white-trash fantasy figures in the history of the movies, has a hypnotic quality that will make you follow her character whatever she says or does.

The main problem of Mr. Morgan’s Last Love is a structural one, as it is really two films in one.

Ambitiously mounted but wildly uneven.

Tonally surprisingly coherent, Franco’s apostles seem to have directed, as Pauline Kael would’ve said, on their knees.

The film contains numerous stylistic flourishes... But none of these elements advance the story, prompt a deeper emotional response or suggest something new about the characters, reducing them to meaningless window-dressing for what little story their is.

With jokes that fall flat so often, the film’s cardiograph flatlines before the first five minutes are over.

The comedy here feels secondhand and becomes grating when no cliche is left unused, whether about nationality, race, gays or the female gender.

While the precociously talented Sidney, played by Logan Lerman, is not an uninteresting character, the artificially constructed nature of the narrative gives the supposedly shocking revelations way too much importance, essentially subjugating any sense of character development and flaws to its mystery-type structure.

It is not just a tough sit; it is nearly impossible to get through.

Beautifully played and impeccably lit and composed, this high-quality family drama takes its time to introduce its flawed but human protagonists and then steadily builds toward a payoff that’s at once cathartic and artfully restrained.

A snazzy, fast-paced pic that’s nonetheless somewhat enslaved by the get-rich-quick and crime-doesn’t-pay cliches that finally trip up the lowlife protags.

There is a clear sense here that Coixet is completely out of her depth in this genre exercise, which is all excessive surfaces and no tension, however hard the music and sound effects try to tell audiences otherwise.

The screenplay, written by French arthouse writer-director Antoine Barraud (Les gouffres) with an assist from U.S. scribe Edwards, too often seems to be under the mistaken impression that making a movie for kids means everything needs to be overly spelled out, especially by using as many short-hand clichés as possible.

The conceit is pure genre fluff, but the underlying economics make less sense upon closer inspection... That said, Maiga projects so much intelligence and integrity it's hard not to warm to her character and she has believable chemistry of the mismatched kind with Boublil, who's up to his usual but quite charming shtick.

Caissy and his editor, Mathieu Bouchard-Malo, manage to construct something that acquires a cumulative force that speaks compellingly and much more generally about the intersection of youth, education and personal morality than the specific cases of these often nameless, zit-sprinkled pieces of work.

A pretty straightforward coming-of-age story that’s well-observed and manages to be intimate and explicit without becoming exploitative.

There are some fascinating cracks in his constantly upbeat personality that Rice manages to smuggle in. A little more of this material, or at least a little more carefully edited and juxtaposed with the rest, might have made the film less of a valentine for Oakley fans and more of a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a relatively new phenomenon in general and this "personality" in particular.

Without a strong point of view, it becomes hard to care about either the people or the issues with which they are grappling.

The actors impressively give it their all.

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is a time capsule as much as a direct historical document, showing not only what the Allied Forces found when they first arrived at the Nazi concentration camps but also how the British government of the time thought it was appropriate to communicate about the Nazi atrocities.

Strictly in terms of basic plot, Eastern Business isn’t exactly innovative. But what makes the film stand out is how perceptive it is about Moldova’s place in (Eastern) Europe and how it uses its characters’ behavior to illustrate points about human behavior that’s recognizable the world over.

Finally less a two-stories-for-the-price-of-one situation than essentially two films of about an hour each, this is nonetheless a visually impressive Hollywood calling card for Jimenez, who almost manages to overcome the material’s structural weaknesses with impressive directorial verve.

Writer-directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez shrewdly use their Average Joe protagonist to explore questions of (feigned) political disinterest and civil responsibility under a repressive dictatorship.

The film tries but often struggles to properly fuse the personal and the political.

Part of the film is a realistic drama about two men in love with the same woman but because they are both involved in illegal activities, the negative tension between them gives rise to several jungle setpieces that are real nail-biters

This kind of film wouldn’t stand a chance if the actors weren’t believable but Garcia (who starred in El Amparo, which Cordova edited) and non-professional Reyes are both understated but utterly authentic.

Despite its structural problems and mostly foreseeable storyline, the small, very human moments such as these ensure that Mario feels authentic and is, finally, moving.

Fascinating and insightful if also (perhaps necessarily) somewhat checkered.

Though the subject is a largely familiar one, this is a work of considerable tonal complexity, as it stirs moments of pitch-black humor and short and violent reveries into an otherwise austerely told tale of spousal strife that wants to smash the patriarchy with feats of cinematic derring-do.

One in a Thousand’s lack of narrative focus and conflict results in a drawn-out, almost non-rhythm that at least mirrors the lazy summer days it depicts.