Carson Lund

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.

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

For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.

A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.

The complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.

Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.

The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.

Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.

The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.

It broods along as if it's expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.

The whole affair suggests dramatic Tetris, and it leeches the artist and his process of any mystery.

The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.

There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.

This is exactly the kind of movie at which David Wain took aim with his sublime rom-com parody They Came Together.

The film’s default state is an ambient inertia that gestures vaguely in multiple directions without concerning itself with the hard work of constructing an argument, a convincing milieu, or even a compelling mood.

The film, whose disparate narrative threads unsurprisingly never connect, drowns in weirdness for its own sake.

Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.

From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.

A phony collection of storytelling clichés held under the banner of archetype and lent a modicum of weight by the splendor of the landscape.

Never once does it project an intuitive understanding of how humans would behave or react in the midst of such a shattering misfortune.