Clayton Dillard

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

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

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

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.

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

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

On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.

The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.

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

The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.

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

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.

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.

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

The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.

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

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.

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

Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.

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