Derek Smith

Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.

Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.

The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.

Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.

The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.

The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.

As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.

Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.

Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.

The film feels like sitting through extended acting exercises where everyone is giving it 110% every take.

The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.

The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.

It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.

A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.

Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.

That a drop from John Williams’s Jaws score wouldn’t be out of place on this film’s soundtrack goes to show how tactlessly Paul Greengrass milks tragedy for titillation.

The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.

The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.

The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.

Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.

Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.

Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.

The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.

The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.