Carson Lund

Shot in 4:3 with sliver-thin depth of field and a lush palette of swampy greens, Amman Abbasi's film is largely predicated on the idea of imparting a hyperreal sensuality to a region not often depicted on the big screen.

If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.

Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.

Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.

The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.

It sticks firmly to a Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of the hazards inherent to modern urban life.

Writer-director Louise Archambault's neatly affirmative denouement is at odds with the more uncertain reality occurring at the edges of the film's drama.

Michael Showalter is content to trade They Came Together's mischievous genre deconstructionism for cheap-shot indie quirk.

It's too texturally exacting in its recreation of a transitory moment in U.S. history to register as a failure.

Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.

While Ruben Östlund’s mastery of visually amplifying social unease is still very much intact, he’s partially undone here by his own thematic ambition, which, in scene after exquisitely staged scene, threatens to put too fine a point on otherwise thrillingly indeterminate situational comedy.

For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.

The documentary is just more of what we've come to expect from director Richard Linklater's expanded fanverse.

It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.

The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.

Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way.

It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.

Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.

There’s a moving study within the film of a man in emotional paralysis learning to redirect his love from the past to the present, but it’s too often obscured by a muted revenge yarn that’s no less banal because it’s tastefully directed.

Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.

Fatih Akin falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of his grand-scale narrative.

One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.