Clayton Dillard

The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.

The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.

It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.

The film quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.

Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.

Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.

The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.

Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.

The film is overrun with characters, but it's less interested in their identity than their plasticity.

The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”

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.

A mostly laugh-free, paint-by-numbers approach to a pair of former pros vying for relevance as they enter, kicking and screaming, into their mid 30s.

Andrew Rossi pays sporadic lip service to recognizing cultural specificity before returning to his star-gazing ways.

This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.

There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.

One senses that all of these kinds of documentaires are finally aggrandizing shrines made by artists trying to erect something out of nothing.

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

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.

The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.

Tim Blake Nelson's film immerses itself into as many pain-induced (and painful) subplots as it possibly can.

The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.

The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.

The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.

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

It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.

Not merely rote, Boulevard is contemptible for a belief in its own stature as a daring attempt to parse through the minutia of its core relationship, where Nolan's uncertain sexuality would be terms enough to laud the film's provocative insights.

The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.