Clayton Dillard

Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.

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

Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.

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

It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.

By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.

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.

Sam Pollard's documentary teeters on reaching a higher plane of meaning simply through the efficiency of its information.

This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.

A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.

How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.

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

It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.

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.

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

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

The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.

Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.