Clayton Dillard

After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.

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.

Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.

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

The film plods from one gruesome moment to the next, as if its mere aversion to optimism constitutes a philosophy.

Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.

Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.

The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.

It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.

It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.

Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.

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.

It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.

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

The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.

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.

Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.

Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.

Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.

The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.

The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.

If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.

Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.

Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.

Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.

Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.

While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.

The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.