Clayton Dillard

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

It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.

The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.

The film is an incoherent and aesthetically barren harangue masquerading as a revisionist history lesson.

The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.

It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.

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

Jin Mo-young fetishizes his subjects' wholly modest behaviors as cute manifestations of a pure form of human interaction.

The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.

The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.

The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.

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

It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.

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 final note of optimism is consistent with the documentary's overall tone and interest in perseverance.

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

The film's Cuban specificity comes to seem like an opportunistic locale for reenacting a decidedly art-cinematic legacy.

The film's very design turns out to be a whimpered bark followed by a toothless bite.

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.

Given its nearly episodic structure, formal choices, and similar thematic inquiries, Sworn Virgin suggests an unofficial remake of Vivre Sa Vie.

Andrew Rossi pays sporadic lip service to recognizing cultural specificity before returning to his star-gazing ways.

The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.

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

The film quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.

The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.

The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.

The film's larger purpose, be it about the ardor of handmade crafts or artist Tom Sachs's artistic ambitions, never emerges with any consistent focus.

Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.

The film is overrun with characters, but it's less interested in their identity than their plasticity.

Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.

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

It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.

It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.

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.

An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.

The premise thoughtlessly combines elements from Marvel comics, Men and Black, and a swath of '80s pop culture to curiously neutered effect.

Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.

As in Judd Apatow's films, crassness is boasted as shamelessness, and calculated sentimentality is dressed up as empathy.

There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.

It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.

The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.

Tim Blake Nelson's film immerses itself into as many pain-induced (and painful) subplots as it possibly can.

Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.

By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.

It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.

A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.

The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.

The film is less a revisionist take on the circumstances of John Gotti's 1992 indictment than a tedious love child of Bonnie and Clyde and Goodfellas.

According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.

By negating more conventional, facts-first priorities, Mor Loushy creates an alternative historiography that's more meant to be felt than learned.

The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.

With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.

The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.

The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.

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

The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.

It doesn't trust the inherently complex material to speak for itself or care to consider its consequences beyond instances of manufactured, gut-wrenching immediacy.

The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.

Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.

The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.

Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.

It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.

Everything in Mikael Håfström's film is needlessly bloated to accommodate its status as an international, prestige production.

It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.

It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.

The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.

North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”

It uses convention to its advantage through an intriguing play with casting choices and bizarrely effective allusions to film history.

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.

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

Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.

A mostly laugh-free, paint-by-numbers approach to a pair of former pros vying for relevance as they enter, kicking and screaming, into their mid 30s.

It wants for a keener vision of corrupted power, but at least Mora Stephens navigates her main character's sudden slew of infidelities without banalizing them.

Character relations are hinted at and even primed for confrontation, but without payoff or meaningful conclusion.

Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.

A hodgepodge of horny-old-man clichés writ large, staged as a gleeful affirmation of its male lead's ego and entitlement.

Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.

The kind of wholly misconceived thriller that begs asking precisely what its filmmakers were seeking to accomplish.

It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.

Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.

The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.

Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.

One senses that all of these kinds of documentaires are finally aggrandizing shrines made by artists trying to erect something out of nothing.

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.

Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.

One wishes the director had as burning of an interest in significance as he does trickery and quippery.

Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.

Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.

The film plods from one gruesome moment to the next, as if its mere aversion to optimism constitutes a philosophy.

Not merely rote, Boulevard is contemptible for a belief in its own stature as a daring attempt to parse through the minutia of its core relationship, where Nolan's uncertain sexuality would be terms enough to laud the film's provocative insights.

Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.

Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.

Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.

Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.

Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.

It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.