Clayton Dillard

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

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

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

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

Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.

Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.

The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.

Most disheartening is how the female leads aren't given ample space to develop as dynamic characters beyond the most urgent confines of the script's scenarios.

It wants for a keener vision of corrupted power, but at least Mora Stephens navigates her main character's sudden slew of infidelities without banalizing them.

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

The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.

Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.

For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.

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

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.

There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.

Michael Levine provides a history without a real sense of individuated struggle or even singular personage.

Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.

An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.