Clayton Dillard

Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.

It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.

In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.

The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.

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

It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.

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

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

The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.

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

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.

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.

Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.

Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.

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

Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."

What progressively mounts tension is the film's understanding of a boy's gradually realized homosexuality as being inextricable from the central metaphor of compromised vision.

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

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

Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.

A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.

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

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.

Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).

The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.

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.

Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.

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

Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.

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.

Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

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 seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.

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 tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.

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

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 Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.

A routinely assembled mélange of provocative material consistently undone by its maker's perplexing need to foist himself into the center of every conversation.

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.

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

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

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

Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.

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

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.

Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.

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.

It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.

The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.

The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.

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

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.

An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.

The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.

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

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.

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

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

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

Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.

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

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.

Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.

Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.