Chris Barsanti

Dramatically constructed and studded with sharp, thoughtful points of view,The Oslo Diaries nevertheless falls down on one point. The movie doesn’t get as much sunlight into the PLO viewpoint on the process, focusing almost exclusively on Israeli domestic politics.

Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.

At its best, John Lewis: Good Trouble is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present.

By the time Jarecki is done with Elvis, the lanky, and projects-raised, rockabilly kid just one generation removed from sharecroppers has been cast as everything from an opportunist and grasping capitalist to addled addict to just plain sucker. If he ever was the King, the movie suggests, it’s long past time to retire the crown.

Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.

Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.

The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.

It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.

The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services.

Clumsy and erratic, though possessed of an undeniable bounding and puppy-like energy, How to Build a Girl is a star vehicle for Feldstein that, while it often does not do its star justice, also knows when to just stay out of her way.

The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.

As Odysseus returned home after his troubled journey to find yet more strife, Coogan and Brydon go back to their familiar schtick—long drives and touristy rambles punctuated by expensively minimalist dinners, all of it borne on a tide of joshing, snarky banter—only to discover more discomfort.

This is a riveting, important story in which the personal can’t help but be political.

The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.

Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.

Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.

Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn’t occur.

As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.

Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.

It’s a sign of how quickly it feels like the world is being torn apart around us that even a ripped-from-the-headlines documentary, such as Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s The Great Hack, can feel almost dated.

The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.

The broad-spectrum approach of LA 92 resists easy answers while still holding a strong editorial viewpoint about the overlapping institutional defects that led to the riots.

With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.

Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.

Satirically tart throughout, The Reagan Show is still a schizoid experience. It mostly wants to dissect the Reaganites’ bread and circuses tactics, but also to present a thumbnail history of his presidency. Both are credibly delivered, but they don’t always necessarily mesh.

Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.

If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.

Blisteringly caustic as ever, John Lydon nevertheless reveals himself as an occasionally sentimental sort in Tabbert Fiiller’s fitfully revelatory and charming documentary.

Unlike its subject, Radical Wolfe would rather be liked than start something.

Burroughs’ off-the-cuff backroom commentary registers almost more than anything else shown on stage in this curiously essential document of a time when things were changing more than anyone could comprehend.

The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.

Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.

A thin but heartfelt piece of work ... But with Ferrara content to let his subject mostly drive the show and not impose more of an authorial vision and context that could have created a grander narrative about the history of moviegoing in New York, the passion is missing.

The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.

The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.

There is only so much a director can do to bring surprise to certain stock elements—it would be refreshing to just once see a convoy survive a movie without being ambushed—but Sollima knits together big, sweeping aerial shots and tight-in, juddering angles that work each nerve not already done to pieces by all the automatic weapons fire and exploding vehicles.

For a musical so dedicated to celebrating and critiquing the transformative potential of cinematic fantasy, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman brings relatively little of the kind of overwhelming star power that can truly transport audiences.

By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.

The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.

With its star-studded cast of experts, from Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk to automated warfare experts like Peter Singer, and a brief that is nothing short of the survival of humanity, Do You Trust This Computer? is a more sprawling and diffuse piece of work. It has a larger frame of reference than Paine’s battery-car docs but never hammers it into shape.

It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.

Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.

Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.

Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.

Elton John: Never Too Late comes across as a safe and well-tooled piece of a carefully managed relationship with Disney.

Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.

Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.

The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.

The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.

An astute and fright-filled story, ‘Aum’ is limited by the unknowability of its subjects, registering as a spooky echo from a distant era.

Unfortunately, the tendency of Voyeur to tilt towards comedy undermines the weight of its story.

During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.

Shrouded in an elegiac reverie, The Midnight Sky is a frequently beautiful movie, from the mechanical ballet of the bird-like Aether to the brief glimpses of K-23, where Jupiter looms in a purplish night sky. But its inability to make a strong connection between the separated stories, and a tone that slips sometimes from poetic quietude to sentimentality, keep the movie from taking a long and honest look at the devastation its reticent mood only suggests.

The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.

The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.

The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.

The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.

Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.

By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.

The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.

False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.

A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.

Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.

The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.

Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.

The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.

At some point before the truncated-seeming finale, the film is just chasing its own tail.

The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.

Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.

Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.

Try as the filmmakers do to conjure a restorative kind of magic in its searching, yearning storyline of renewal, they are not able to come up with much more than a limping comedy about a woman with all-too-easily-explained mental issues.

Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.

It’s strange that The Equalizer 2 is such a sluggish ride. Fuqua and Washington have developed a body of work over the years that is, if nothing else, reliably kinetic. But with Wenk’s pedestrian writing, there just isn’t much for Washington to work with here.

Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.

Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.

The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.

While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.

Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.

These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.

This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.

The film’s ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of its protagonist’s world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him.

The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.

Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.

Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.

Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.

Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.

Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.

The direction by Ruben Fleischer (Zomebieland, Gangster Squad) is oddly slapdash, and hardly does justice to the skills of his cast or his own chops as a comedic filmmaker. Hardy squeezes some baffled comedy out of his schizoid shtick, but there just isn’t much here for him to work with.

Anyone happening to come across Silencio should just as well move on: There’s nothing to see here.

It’s only when River Runs Red gets to about the hour mark that a story begins to cohere. Up until that point, it had taken the most perfunctory of stabs at being a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about police shootings.

In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.