Clayton Dillard

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

Tracy Droz Tragos's documentary examines its titular subject with a compassionate eye for regional detail.

It insists that it's in moments of small talk, between life's larger events, that one finds vitality.

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

Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.

Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.

It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.

Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.

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

The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.

It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.

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

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

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

Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.

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

It too quickly opts out of its Scenes from a Marriage-like potential for what amounts to an augmented take on The Straight Story.

Whereas the more grounded scenes of Death Note anchor a startlingly bloody fantasy of power run amok, the scenes that fixate on super powers and code-busting seldom manage to rise above the realm of serviceable YA fiction.

The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.

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

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

The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images further reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.

Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.

Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.

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

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

If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.

The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.

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

Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.

Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.

Superbly acted and sporadically intriguing thriller, yet it has a difficult time locating more stringent meaning and significance beyond its outward narrative of duplicitous actions and veiled motivations.

The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.

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.

The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.

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

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

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.

Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.

Elite Zexer weaves an impressively terse narrative of distinctly motivated characters, but the film’s core remains somewhat shapeless due to the routine dramatization.

It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.

Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.

Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.

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

It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.

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

The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.

The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.

The film’s nagging representational problem stems from its reductive sense of place and portraiture of emotional displacement, which gradually phases out the possibility of thornier revelations.

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

The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.

This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.

Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.

Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.

The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.

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

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

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.”

It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.

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

There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.

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

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

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

Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.

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

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

Most disheartening is how the female leads aren't given ample space to develop as dynamic characters beyond the most urgent confines of the script's scenarios.

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.

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

The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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