Clayton Dillard

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

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

A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.

The film's Cuban specificity comes to seem like an opportunistic locale for reenacting a decidedly art-cinematic legacy.

For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.

Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).

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

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.

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

The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.

Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.

The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.

The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.

Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

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.

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

It doesn't trust the inherently complex material to speak for itself or care to consider its consequences beyond instances of manufactured, gut-wrenching immediacy.

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

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

It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.

The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.

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

That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.

Jin Mo-young fetishizes his subjects' wholly modest behaviors as cute manifestations of a pure form of human interaction.

The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.

The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.

Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.