Chris Packham

Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.

Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.

Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.

The script is only lightly didactic and well-paced, and it nods toward the adults in the audience mainly by not insulting their intelligence.

Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they’re about to die.

Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s gorgeous film is informed by that same charm and intelligence the way a sailboat is informed by 7 knots of westerly breeze.

The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.

Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.

This film is unusually slow-paced for its genre, but Zahler’s screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.

It’s completely unfair to compare these characters to (say) Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, funny women who derive dignity from their friendship. But that’s a show written, created, and performed by women, while this film’s creative trust is a clueless, retrograde sausage festivus.

Director Finn Taylor’s Unleashed is an inoffensive Hallmark card of an indie comedy, as indifferently intended by the sender as it is regarded by the recipient.

Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.

Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.

Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.

Though Wajda admires this struggle, the artist’s final pursuit never seems redemptive in the depths of Strzemiński’s isolation and misery.

Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.

Though visually expansive, however, the film feels emotionally intimate.

Rackstraw Downes: A Painter is glacial and mesmerizing, the documentary equivalent of droning Tibetan singing bowls, a work crafted to induce its audience into the same contemplative state as its subject at work.

In this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work, and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews.

Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty and a genuine talent for communicating humanity’s scale against immense natural forces and the absolute howling vastness of time.

The film is wallpapered with beatings, shootings and bloodshed, so its genuine sensitivity to trans issues is welcome and surprising.

Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.

As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance.

Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.

Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.

Lynskey is a luminous counterpoint to Phillips's energetic earthiness, but they can't lift a story with so much killjoy ballast.

Toller's film is narrated entirely by Fields via a series of lengthy recorded interviews that unwind jerkily, like a misshapen bolt of yarn over hundreds of still photos, Super-8 footage, and hand-drawn animations.