Carson Lund

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.

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

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

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.

Portrait of a Garden‘s distance from its human subjects forestalls the film’s momentum and strips it of a heart.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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