Clayton Dillard

Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.

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.

It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.

The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.

The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.

The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.

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.

An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.

As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good.

It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.

The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.

Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.

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

The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.

Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.

Superbly acted and sporadically intriguing thriller, yet it has a difficult time locating more stringent meaning and significance beyond its outward narrative of duplicitous actions and veiled motivations.

The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.

The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.

The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.

There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.

The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.

The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.

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

It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.

It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.

The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.

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

Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.