David Fear

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Whereas Yuen's speciality has always been gonzo, gravity-defying spectacles, now he's spiced his set pieces with plasticine computer-generated flourishes-effectively puncturing the inventive, handmade charm and fluid flurries of artistry that made his classic fight scenes so thrilling.

Whether this love letter is more preaching to the converted than a corrective is arguable.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

This is a passable substitute for the real thing. It could have burrowed so much deeper.

It’s a movie that utilizes every bit of Gavras’ abundant chops and marshals them to make a coherent statement, tapping brains and heart and spleen in the name of forcing you to recognize what he’s putting in front of you.

CODA knows how to work that conventional-to-a-fault indie feeling like a champ. You may exit smiling. Just don’t be surprised if you also experience the sensation of having just been Sundanced to death.

It’s a valentine to a communal gay experience, penned in a way that’s uniquely both insular and inviting.

[Eichner] wanted to make a gay rom-com. It isn’t a huge leap, however, to say that he’s both entertaining a mass audience and leaving his own mark on a long, storied history of fighting to be seen and heard — to tell stories that have been dismissed or neglected or suppressed. Mission accomplished.

Buckley hasn’t had a million portraits sketched of him, much less to this degree. The singularity of It’s Never Over, along with the access and the candor, makes up for a lot here.

Fremont is neither game-changing nor revolutionary. It’s merely a throwback, in the best possible way, to a low-fi aesthetic and low-key way of storytelling you thought had gone the way of the Triceratops. That, in fact, is what makes this deceptively placid, supremely wry movie so damned moving.

Pfeiffer gives an incredible performance as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Zodiac Killer Project starts as an autopsy of a fail, and ends up dismantling the subgenre via a sort of cinematic jujitsu. You leave happy that Shackleton’s project ended up crashing and burning.

As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.

Shindô concocts a stylistic mix of odd experimental flourishes, female nudity, Soviet-style close-ups and baldly sentimental melodrama to emphasize the toll this disaster took; its cup may runneth over, yet the stark vibe is impossible to shake.

Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.

It’s the sort of movie that likes its volume dial to be permanently stuck at 11, its references to be hidden in plain sight and/or deafeningly trumpeted and its freak flag flying very, very high.

The Substance won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.

A collective sense of psychological turmoil seems to weigh heavily on the entire country as much as Champ, reaching critical mass once chaos creeps into the city-leading to a quiet, climactic walk into darkness that earns the right to be called haunting.

The whole of Friendship isn’t as attractive as the sum of its disparate parts, and you wonder if a more concise, focused version of this look at the self-consciousness of dudes trying desperately to bond wouldn’t have hit better.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “greed is good” go-go Eighties.

If Belushi does nothing else, it does a fine job of scaling him back down to size without giving his immense talent short shrift.

Bong is a consummate cinematic craftsman, virtually incapable of creating a dull frame. What’s happening within those impeccable compositions, however, feels like its suffering from an overabundance of business and undernourished storytelling.

Everything goes to hell in a decorative handbasket. What starts out as a simple plan will be destined to become, well, "A Simple Plan" redux.

There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?

It’s heavy, heady stuff, coming at you via a delivery system of catalog-worthy set design, magic-hour cinematography, and often tamped-down, deadpan performances. And somehow, it all works in harmony to create a ripple effect of feeling that reverberates strongly under its placid surfaces.

So often, you can feel filmmakers straining themselves to come up with more extreme ways of shocking and awing you. With this writer-director, you get the sensation that such hallucinogenic, nerve-scrambling sensationalism comes naturally. You wouldn’t say that his agent provocateur touch is subtle. But it is expert.