Clayton Dillard

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.

It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.

Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.

Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.

In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.

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

For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.

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

A work of arduous assemblage that values information over affect and zip over conviction in its ramshackle historicizing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

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

Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.

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

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

For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.

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

The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.

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.

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

The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.

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.

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