Clayton Dillard

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.

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

The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.

Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.

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

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.

Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.

One wishes the director had as burning of an interest in significance as he does trickery and quippery.

Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.

Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.

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

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.

Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.

Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.

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

Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.

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

It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.

It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.

It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.

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

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

Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.

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

Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.

The opposite of enlightenment, the film hides its anxieties behind a mélange of third-rate grit and playful xenophobia.

The film's troubled aesthetics are exacerbated by a screenplay that contains the trappings of amateur toil, including dialogue that harps on innocuous moments and trifling exposition.

If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.