Clayton Dillard

The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.

Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.

With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.

The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.

Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.

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.

Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.

Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.

It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.

There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.

Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.

It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.

Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.

It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.

The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.

Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.

In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.

Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.

Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.

It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.

It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.

The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images further reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.

This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.

Elite Zexer weaves an impressively terse narrative of distinctly motivated characters, but the film’s core remains somewhat shapeless due to the routine dramatization.

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