Clayton Dillard

The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.

Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.

It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.

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

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.

Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.

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

Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.

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

Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.

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

It evolves into an intimate reverie on family and aesthetics, while remaining sporadically attuned to the reflexive and ethical dimensions of ethnographic discovery.

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

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

Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.

A shamelessly derivative and preposterous would-be blockbuster that goofily fashions itself as a sweeping romance, time-travel sci-fi tale, and gallant period piece all at once.

The premise amounts to numerous raised glasses and classical music cues, but little of this schmoozing strikes a notable chord beyond the démodé back-patting engaged throughout.

A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.

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

The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.

It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.

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

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

Vice takes the basic premise from 1973's Westworld and morphs it into an incoherent slog.

It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.

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.

Broomfield isn't so much dedicated to journalistic truth or social ethnography as he is displaying bodies and mindsets of individuals that complicate any sense of Manichean polemics, where good and evil must be reckoned with at a purely secular and corporeal level, particularly along the lines of class and gender.