Clayton Dillard

That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.

The film can never quite decide to what extent it wants to be either a light-hearted raunchy comedy or a darker comedic assessment of contemporary life.

The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.

While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.

Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.

Justin Chon fumbles the take on how his characters' anger fits into the greater landscape of a L.A. during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.

The documentary mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational and financial reform.

The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.

The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.

The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.

Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.

It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.

Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.

The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.

Derek Jarman's footage speaks to the freedoms afforded by the combination of a darkened dance floor and like-minded people.

As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good.

The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.

The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.

The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.

The politics of the film are consistently muddled by director Rodrigo Plá's conspicuous formal choices.

After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.

Michael Levine provides a history without a real sense of individuated struggle or even singular personage.

It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.

The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.

Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.

Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.