Clayton Dillard

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.

The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.

The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.

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.

According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.

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 issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.

Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.

Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.

The film rolls political commentary into the template of a “lost highway” horror film by forgoing ironic distancing.

The final note of optimism is consistent with the documentary's overall tone and interest in perseverance.

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

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

It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.

Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.

Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.

It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.

Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.

Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.

The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.

It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.

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

Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.

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

Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.

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

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.