Chuck Bowen

It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.

One watches the film with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren Jeffs is steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for.

Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.

The setup is so familiar that frustration sets in before the title has barely faded from view.

Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.

It evinces a qualified kind of courage in its anonymous convictions, parodying a world that barely ever existed by barely existing itself.

The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.

Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.

Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What's the point of these fussy allusions?

It grows increasingly hopeless as it contrasts the alien paradise of the opening with the wastelands that resemble corporate dump sites.

The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.

It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.

The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.

The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.

A zig-zagging, free-associational genre item that's mostly concerned with stretching the generally narrow tonal rules of what a thriller can be.

Daniel Augusto relies on familiar tropes pertaining to the sexy, rebellious rock-star artist who does things his own way.

The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.

It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.

The film offers a veritable smorgasbord of dated, only-in-the-movies clichés about the debt-ridden working class.

Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.

The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.

The film is just another fantasy of living only the good portions of the life of an artist.

The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.

Ken Loach's staging is so calm and sober that it turns his story into an expertly photographed yet weirdly remote rebellion tale.

David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.

It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.

It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.

David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.

It alternates awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.

At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.

The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.

Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.

As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.

Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.

Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.

Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."

It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.

Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.

The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.

There's no beauty to this film, little rhythm, none of the physical grace that action-film fans crave even if they don't know they do.

The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.

Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.

Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.

The film often suggests a less defiant cover of The Defiant Ones, yet it's a must-see for Viggo Mortensen's characteristically wonderful performance.

A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.

Chris Messina is eventually a little too indifferent to the machinations of the plot, but the film, however inescapably sentimental, is a romantic daydream that casts a lovely spell.

Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.

The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.

Asghar Farhadi's sensibility embodies a combination of empathy and paranoia that's striking considering that the latter is normally driven by self-absorption.

Another macho celebration of fighting for "freedom" because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the inherent irony of that ideology.

A fawning tribute to the cult legend, enriched by a subtle current of sadness that prevents the documentary from turning into a glorified DVD supplement.

The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.

The film can't reconcile Ron Rash's apocalyptic tenderness with its own eagerness to revel in romantic star allure.

After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.

It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.

Thomas McCarthy evinces no interest in the people who come into Max's store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades. Not a shred.

The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.

The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.

Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.

The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.

Each of the six vignettes that make up this unusually energetic anthology pertains to the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are (barely) hidden beneath the practices of social institutions.

So flimsily constructed, visually and narratively, that it resembles a middle-school play that's been hastily filmed on an antique camcorder.

Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.

A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.

For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.

Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.

Peter Strickland charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies in order to somehow reach the other end of perception, which acknowledges the ultimate empathetic limitations of said fantasies.

It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.

Any pretense of satire collapses by the film's midpoint, leaving only the contempt.

The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.

The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.

Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.

Clint Eastwood startlingly grips the audience with his sense of hypnotic silence, which carries suggestions of what might be termed politically apolitical pragmatism.

Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.

Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.

The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.

The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.

This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.

A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.

Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.

Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.

Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.

This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.

You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.

It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.

Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.

It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.

Drive Hard is the action-film equivalent of one of those folks who relentlessly speak of having it tough all over as they plan their third yearly vacation.

Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.

Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.

Terry Gilliam has imposed a mix tape of his greatest hits, whose greatness was debatable to begin with, on a whiff of a story that might've flourished under the maxim "less is more."

It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.

The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.

Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.

The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.

The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.

Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.

Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.

It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.

Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.

This is less a movie than a dutiful renewal of a recognizable title's licensing rights.

Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.

The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.

The director diligently keeps her heroine's ego in check, and that's awfully principled of her, but her audience may feel as if they've inadvertently booked a trip with no destination.

Aarón Fernández captures one of the most heartening elements of sex: that it doesn't always oblige our rules or expectations.

An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.

There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.

The film preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.

There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.

Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.

Frontloaded with a surprising amount of plot, the film takes forever to get going, but it's the filmmakers' hypocrisy that really grates.

Marc Bauder's documentary quietly detonates the conservative notion that our largest corporations should be allowed to duke it out in metaphorical no-holds-barred cage matches.

With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.

Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.

The film ultimately leaves you feeling as if you're stuck watching your cousin's boring slideshow of his trip to Palookaville.

We're simply presented a person in trouble, and we're allowed to recognize his problems as extreme embodiments of universal issues of terror, confusion, and loneliness.

There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.

Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.

Like a number of cult directors to emerge in the 1970s, Henry Jaglom values a party atmosphere at the expense of narrative cohesion.

A potential barroom joke blossoms into a surprisingly poignant portrait of three aging men wrestling with how to shed their mortal coil.

It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.

It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.

The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.

The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.

Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.

A sexily chaotic parody of entitlement becomes just another tale of a white dude learning that there are worse things in life than essentially having no problems.

An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.

The premise might make sense, if only hypocritically, but the film abandons this already flimsy parody of macho pride disastrously at the last minute.

There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.

The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.

By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.

Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.

You may feel as if you're watching two or three abbreviated episodes of Law & Order in quick succession rather than a fully realized movie.

Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.

Farhadi navigates his complicated narrative thicket with an apparent ease that confirms yet again that he's an amazing talent, but here he isn't able to blend the brushstrokes as he has in prior films.

To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.

It compellingly captures a family wrestling mightily with the riddles and contradictions of a culture that promotes achievement at all costs with little thought as to what that actually means.

The film's method of admitting its own hypocrisy so as to enable it to further indulge said hypocrisy grows more grating than if it were merely indifferently conceived junk like Falling Down.

A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.

Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.

The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.

There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

The film ultimately doesn't live up to this early potential, as Keanu Reeves loses his way in the third act with too many false climaxes.

Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.

Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.

The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.

The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.

It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.

The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.

Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.

It ambitiously parodies and mourns the implications of the one coherent message that mass media manages to convey to all of its consumers in all its endlessly proliferating, ever-shifting permutations.

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.

Taste and good intentions are only going to get one so far with a script this tone deaf and direction this ugly and monotonous.

The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.

Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.

After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.

The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.

It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.

Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.

The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.

The tension almost immediately leaks out of the narrative once we realize we're watching a found-footage horror movie.

One sees a film called 100 Bloody Acres expecting the requisite allusions to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but an homage to the best scene in Melvin and Howard comes as something of a shock.

It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.

Yet another ghost story that insists there's nothing more chilling than a professional woman charged with raising a child on her own.

As one incoherent action scene follows another, one's left staring at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.

On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.

Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.

The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.

The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.

The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.

Pauline Chan's film is a jumbled mixture of redemptive uplift and genre hijinks.

A middling genre movie, but it's oddly likable for its conflicted, unresolved tension.

D.W. Young navigates his varying moods with an ease that's particularly impressive for a director making his feature debut, but he never capitalizes on his ability to coax down our guard.

The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.

It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.

Writer-director Andy Gillies's film is extremely self-conscious, but in a fashion that generally serves the material.

A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.

The film belongs to a long tradition of horror films that offensively suggest that all atheists might as well hang a Welcome sign up for the devil.

Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.

The filmmaker's failure of empathy for those who strive to outlaw medicinal marijuana turns the protestors into hissable puritanical bad guys.

The "male gaze" that often despicably and hypocritically surfaces in these kinds of films is pointedly absent throughout.

It's eventually obvious that Cory McAbee mistakenly believes that his characters' resolutely dull adventures speak for themselves.

Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.

The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.

The film spins its wheels for almost an hour until collapsing under the weight of exposition that renders the mystery nearly besides the point.

Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.

Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.

The film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.

The romantic quest that's meant to drive the film is meaningless because Alexander Poe has extended empathy to no one besides himself.

Fifteen minutes into Festival of Lights you come to the discouraging realization that you know every infuriating plot beat that will follow.

We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.

Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.

Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.

It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.

As a portrait of a self-pitying drunk's wet dream of inexplicable atonement, it's fairly effective, but as a story meant to take place on some rational version of planet Earth, it's utterly hopeless.

The film never really goes soft, as Jordan Roberts never loses sight of the fact that these toxic nincompoops are authentically bad for one another.

One can't help but sense that underneath the complicated art-house game-playing of Isaki Lacuesta's The Double Steps resides a theme that's sentimental and old-hat.

Pang Ho-cheung can't help but humanize Vulgaria's characters, which is a kiss of death for what's meant to be a farce of escalating obscenity.

Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.

As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.

Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.

After a promising entrapment scene that offers some casually eerie narrative details, the film collapses, lurching awkwardly between a variety of tones and intentions.

It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.

Not much happens in The Victim, but the events that do manage to transpire consistently support a reading of the film as an older man's fantasy of virility.

Ultimately plodding and resolutely old-fashioned, a corporate thriller for folks too square to indulge the possible existence of hungers so strong they must be satisfied at any cost.

The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.

Say what you will about Burning Man, but writer-director Jonathan Teplitsky can't be accused of spoon-feeding his audience.

Falling Overnight recalls some of the more annoying entries in the mumblecore subgenre that erroneously believe that every indiscriminate moment in a person's life is worthy of a film regardless of subtext.

Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.

The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.

A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.

Kumaré has a premise that could've been the launching point for one of Sascha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles's satirical outrages.

The film is a tedious narrative shambles that's almost hilariously unaware of its racism and sexism.

The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.

Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.

The documentary is briskly paced, often compelling, but a little soft, as it succumbs to hero worship.

Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.

Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"

The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.

Phillip Montgomery's film is ironically as undeveloped and busy as the sensational media it criticizes.

The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.

The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.

A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.

Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.

The doc is so obnoxiously simplistic that you find yourself strangely unsympathetic to its objectively inarguable aim to promote greater standards of elder care.

One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.

Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.

Yoav Factor can't decide whether he wants to play his broad scenario as an exaggerated farce or as a heartwarming testament to blood ties.

Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.

The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.

The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?

Laredoans Speak is bad in a special kind of way that inspires the obviously piteous description of "well-intentioned."

Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.

In the end, it feels unavoidably dull, as there isn't much thematic ambiguity to be found in the assertion that humans deserve life that's defined by more than indentured servitude.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

Loosies never establishes a consistent tone; it feels made up as it went along, and not in the electrifyingly free-wheeling fashion of, say, a Godard or Altman film.

In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.

After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.

Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.

The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.

My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.

The Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.

The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.

Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.

It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.

One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.

The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.

Inside Out should be wild and violent, playing on the soap-operatic mood swings that drive televised wrestling; instead it's one or two murders away from being a Lifetime movie of the week.

A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.

A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

The film, for all its trite lessons, forgets that people mainly play golf because they enjoy it.

The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.

Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.