Calum Marsh

The faults and merits of the free-school movement are elucidated with a steely, journalistic rigor. More surprising is that this candid glimpse plays as exhilarating drama.

Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.

The Barefoot Artist, co-directed by Yeh's own son, veers too close to hagiography, and as a result makes Yeh look not so much like a well-meaning global citizen as a bona fide saint.

The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.

Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.

Story of My Death is a singular work, and its originality is apparent in every frame.

Greene seems fascinated by the contradictory identities — each a kind of real-life performance — that Burre endeavors to reconcile, and he is profoundly sensitive to the emotional truth these performances describe.

An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.

Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.

The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.

The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.

What ultimately holds the film back, I believe, is its tendency to err too far on the side of that sweetness — it indulges too often in the hallmarks of the mediocre indie, the stuff a press release might call quirk, to level its more substantial points with real seriousness.

Without Shepherds is all sprawl, a loose mélange of talking heads and landscape b-roll.

Beneath exhausts the appeal of its thinly sketched characters almost as soon as they're trapped together in the mine's emergency bunker, and it isn't long before Ketai, tiring of human drama, turns instead toward the supernatural.

The story proceeds with all the flighty unreality of a film unconcerned with real-world scientific rigor... but Cahill manufactures enough conspiracies, coincidences, and extraordinary turns of plot to keep his thinking audience too busy to care.

[Aja] has outfitted Horns with enough talent that the film is rather easy to admire aesthetically. The problems are more foundational, even conceptual—and they are thus harder to reconcile.

Bertolucci, despite his obvious affection for Lorenzo, can't help but seem out of touch, and his hero looks and sounds less like a modern-day teen than an old man's wistful idea of one.

Certainly, a lot of blood is spilled in the name of laughs. There's only one problem with its broad attempts at grotesque comedy: Jackpot simply isn't funny.

Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.

This attention to the personal crises of Segerstedt comes at the expense of a broader and more elusive subject, namely, the war. We know what Segerstedt did, and Troell tries to ask why. What he ignores are the implications.

Tobia approaches comedy in the same way that John Cassavetes did, which is to say that he embraces the absurdity of human behavior at the same time that he recoils from it.

Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face conjures the aura of Goldin's halcyon days with the ease of diaristic reminiscence, and for that it proves a valuable record. But on the subject of her cultural significance the film remains oddly quiet.

The director, Nicolas Mercier, has failed to grasp how repellent his own protagonist seems to us. By the end, he's tipped his hand, and what seemed an incisive portrait is revealed as oddly skewed.

Much has changed in the two decades since the release of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, but, as The Angriest Man in Brooklyn flatly reminds us, the grievances of America's petulant middle-class men apparently have not.

At its best, this descent into madness plays out like a millennial stoner's take on Jacob's Ladder. More often, it recalls a sobering truth: Nobody likes listening to someone ramble while high.

You can sense the director, Sarah Smick, gearing up to make a point. It proves rather obvious: Real connections are meaningful and too much Facebook is bad. But isn't the real problem more insidious?

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

None of the reliably irritating qualities of the social issue documentary gall quite so acutely as the tendency to venerate mere awareness.

Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.

It is amazing, given the modesty of its scope and means, how much Manakamana is able to achieve.

Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.

Just a Sigh's day-long liaison sustains interest largely for the appeal of Devos and Byrne, its accomplished leads — they share what is known in the rom-com lexicon as "chemistry," and this quality invigorates their time together, in bed and out.

At its best, the film does the job of the albums lost to the floods: It captures a town's history.

Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.

the film's occasional fits of comic inanity — locals ranting about aliens, conversations about two-headed dogs — are certainly embarrassing. But its attempts at melodrama are outright repugnant.

For all its comic panache, A Fantastic Fear of Everything too often feels forced rather than funny — the strain evident in the setup is rarely worth the payoff, and the result simply proves exhausting.

Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.

The Double taps into a deep reservoir of psychic turmoil even as it navigates the script’s abundant jokes, and the nightmare of the heart of the film is doubtless universal.

This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.

It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.

This is a guy who seeks to mock idiocy? Physician, heal thyself.

White Reindeer concedes that much about Christmas is funny — its notions quaint, its fixtures cliched. But it proposes that beneath this sometimes lurid veneer lay something to cherish all the same.

Resoundingly terrible.

Gentle has its charms, and August's vision of the world, archaic though it may willingly be, is appealingly urbane .

The awe incited by the world is enough — no pontificating necessary, man.

The result is a pleasure, perhaps as much for audiences as for Polanski; it's a chance to luxuriate in the atmosphere of world-class Formula One, here a lavish free-love party interrupted now and again by a few laps on the track.

Refusing to think small, Lonergan cannot help but fail big.

Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.

Fixed cameras lend themselves well to dimly lit effects and shrewd obfuscation, and McGinn proves a fine hand at stock-horror misdirection.

Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.

Good design rests at the intersection of function and beauty. Design Is One, alas, has far too little of the latter.

Part of what’s so invigorating about A Touch of Sin is its refusal to betray the depth of its intellectual ambition, deferring when needed to generic convention and relishing the entertainment which follows.

Rather than thrilling, the courtroom sequences seem only enervating, nudging us toward a quiet outrage.

The film is starved for the kind of nuance Kore-eda wields effortlessly elsewhere. What’s left without it is something merely schematic.

Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.

Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.

The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.

The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.

The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.

Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.

The film articulates this dimension of the story, regrettably, in little more than biopic platitudes and daddy-issue clichés...But it's not all bad. Badgley delivers a nuanced performance of such ferocity he almost singlehandedly makes a conventional film seem loose and improvisatory.

Many Hollywood films are founded on privilege, but few are as open and nasty about their racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

When The Angels' Share suddenly transforms, in its final act, into a kind of farcical heist picture, that fleeting slapstick tendency wins out, regrettably diminishing the film's social consciousness in the process.

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.

Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.

Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.

One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.