Clayton Dillard

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

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.

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

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

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

Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.

While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.

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

Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.

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

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

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

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.”

János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The primary pleasure of the film resides in its awareness of the impossibilities of unity, whether physical or cultural, within a rapidly transforming global milieu.

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.

It ironically reveals its intent to suture shut any remote ambivalence regarding its own gung-ho ethos, in effect engaging the same sort of oppressively dogmatic tactics it so outwardly denigrates.

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

Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.

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

A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.

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

Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.

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

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

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.

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

Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.

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

As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.

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.

It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.

It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.

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

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

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

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

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

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

Christian Carion's film shamelessly wrings excitement from the recreation of violent ideological conflict.

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

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

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

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

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.