Clayton Dillard

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

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

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

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.

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

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

Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.

An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.

The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.

Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there's a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.

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.

If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.

Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.

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

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

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

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.

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

The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.

A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.

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

Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.

There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.

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

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

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.

For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.

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

The cinematography looks striking enough throughout the various set pieces, but little happens in them to elevate Heart of Stone past its hackneyed foundation.

Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.

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

Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.

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

The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.

The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.

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

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

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

The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.

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

It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.

The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.

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.

Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.

Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.

The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.

For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.

The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.

There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.

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

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.

Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.

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

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

The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.

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