Calum Marsh

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.