Diego Semerene

Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.

The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.

The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.

The Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.

Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.

The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.

Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.

The film is an unending source for the worst possible clichés and most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing.

Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit.

Erin Derham’s unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy’s subversive spirit.

We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.

Unlike My Life in Pink, Daughter of Mine sidesteps all ambiguity, as the film reveals everything about its characters straight away, leaving little room for unexpected complexities about their predicaments to develop.

Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.

Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.

The Children Act stages the clumsiness of belated domestic confrontations with the very coldness that’s kept its characters from having discussed their emotions for decades and from having had sex for almost a year.

Glenn Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.

The film's refusal to produce a campy critique feels more like the product of lack of imagination than a purposeful repudiation.

The film is a rebellion of surfaces that never quite reaches, or emanates from, the underpinning roots of its fable.

The very act of having kids and demanding perfect conformity from them is never questioned by the film.

The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.

Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.

Although João Moreira Salles tries to tap into the pleasurable elements inherent to the essayistic as a cinematic form, such as making the merging of intimate and social reality poetically visible, his storylines never quite gel.

Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.

Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.

The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.

If the global reunion that the cruise ship presents here is such a panacea, why is there so much moping?

It begins as a clever pseudo-mumblecore provocation with shades of Bruce LaBruce only to quickly turn into indefensible nonsense.

Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.

School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s slasher-film plot is simply a tease, as there are no scares here, and the filmmaker’s attempt at genre hybridization never coheres conceptually.

The film eventually replaces the captivating smallness of everyday life with an inconsequential drama.

If not for its performances, the film would belong in the category of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers.

If there’s anything worth mulling over about The Drowning, it's the way it proffers the East Coast couple as an inevitably miserable institution without really meaning to.

The film is essentially an exercise in forcing a female genius back into her proper place of dependence on both the father figure and the Prince Charming.

Ritesh Batra's film is a tale of white nostalgia that should have found its footing on dramatic grounds.

Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.

At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.

What the film embodies, unfortunately, the listlessness of its slacker characters.

Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.

Writer-director Tim Kirkman tries to peg depth of character on the character of Dean instead of having him earn it.

It’s difficult to find a reason for the film's existence beyond a spoiled platform for James Franco's ersatz boldness.

Glenn Close's face teems with a flawlessly controlled gravitas that’s completely at odds with the film’s ordinariness.

Clea DuVall crafts an entire film out of aborted attempts at a revelation that feel completely anodyne.

The very few instances where stereotypes are challenged are forced and didactically delivered.

Essentially a post-apocalyptic telenovela, it sanitizes the concept of sisterhood, and even womanhood.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

The ingenuity of writer-director Jeremy LaLonde's film ends with its title.

The hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.

It's difficult to believe in Ryder's gullibility, if not willingness to be caught in his uncle's strange web of provocations.

Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.

The film uses its critique of white privilege as a means to woo the legitimizing gaze of international audiences.

The allegorical possibilities of a disintegrating wall point to a film that could have been.

The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.

The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.

Writer-director Anders Morgenthaler's film is practically an exercise in over-explication.

Throughout, Sonja Bennett embodies slackness as an affectation, not a raw response to a culture of authenticity-killing productivity.

The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.

This is kind of didactic topical movie that distributes its rhetoric evenly between characters with clear distinction as to who's playing devil's advocate to the other one's points.

The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.

It's difficult to swallow the premise of yet another tale of a heroic white Westerner with good intentions trying to give hope to Middle-Eastern misery.

The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.

If the film defies conventional form, it does so without the gravitas that conceptual cohesion brings, quickly rendering its experimentation into gratuitous aesthetic masturbation.

The film is a hybrid of a Lifetime movie focused on a "strong woman," a run-of-the-mill murder mystery, and a yogurt commercial from hell.

For a film so bent on naturalizing the presumably hilarious incongruity of "the sexes," it sure features lots and lots of that site of horror: a naked male body. And for comedic purposes, of course.

Whatever predictable plot the film tries to unfold never lives up to the excitement of its conceptual gimmick.

Sergio Castellitto's film quickly turns out to be more interested in reveling in the secrets of its storyline than in its sentiments.

Bruno Barreto's insistence that this pass for a product that Hollywood might have spawned smoothens a journey built on sharp edges.

It produces a collection of one-dimensional facts strung together with an utmost respect for chronology and documentary-making's most stale conventions.

A shallow film that leaves us knowing exactly what we're seeing, and able to predict what the characters will say to each other in the mostly uninspired and overtly familiar dialogue.

Tammy Caplan and Joe Tyler Gold's film gives off the alienating feel of an inside joke that you miss in the off chance you're not part of the professional magic business.

There's an enormous amount of perverse pleasure to be had here for those who get off on the annihilation of nuance.

In Our Nature's visual style seems plastered on or allocated, not developed with any sort of authorial singularity.

The film decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce Louisa Krause's King Kelly to a one-dimensional narcissist.

A Man's Story does a major disservice to an artiste of fashion with a pretty amazing and prolific oeuvre by reducing him to a Bravo-like personality - a personality whose pettiness Boateng's work, though perhaps not his ego, clearly exceeds.

Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.

There's no pointing toward something other than the work itself, no poetic digression, no suggestion of a conceptual dimensionality to the work being produced.

Doug Langway's film is often too cheesy to, well, bear.

The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.

Oh, the hilarious awkwardness of placing privileged white kids in a place where they don't belong.

As hard as he tries, we never truly believe there's a lot at stake for Garner, who seems to cruise through America like a gringo taking a favela tour in Rio.

While it lends itself to some interesting insight on the politics of non-exclusive, fuck-buddy dynamics, its characters are ultimately too one-dimensional and their dialogue too theatrical to sustain an involving cinematic experience.

The Samaritan treads a fine line between film-noir moodiness and crime-thriller triteness, mostly settling for the latter.

Having the far from goody-goody Kathleen Turner play a holier-than-thou mother bent on winning a devout church title is an inherently hilarious premise.

L!fe Happens wants us to believe its message is one of female independence and empowerment.

Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.

You know a film isn't going to be considered high art when the guy to your left at the press screening is a reporter from Extra and the guy to your right lets out a loud "That's awesome, man" after each scene.

A Warrior's Heart is so inept at developing itself as a film that it hands in all of its devices to the soundtrack itself and becomes a music video.

Private Romeo feels more like a side project from the producers of Glee than some kind of novel queering of Shakespeare's text.

Taking the pedestrian and decidedly unsexy American male to Paris so he can become a sexual human being attuned to life's small pleasures is a tired device that perhaps only Woody Allen could possibly resurrect from the stinky pile of cinematic clichés.

I'm not sure what part of Snowmen doesn't scream completely inappropriate, sentimental Manichean drivel.

The actors are left to go through the motions of a sterile script that director Dennis Lee tries to bring to life not through, for example, Watson's brilliant capacity for facial nuance, but through canned artifice.

One of the film's main problems is the fact that Shlain is so invested in connecting her father's scientific findings... with an astonishingly linear history of the world that she fails to see the more private connections that flicker in and out of her verbose voiceover.

This time-tested project of tracing gayness back to when its shame was so explicitly enforced feels not only passé, and naïve, but mostly unproductive in a post-Judith Butler world in which drag queens are on TV teaching biological women how to better perform womanhood.

This is didactic self-help drivel of the worst kind, as filmmaker Rupam Sarmah creates a return-to-the-origin narrative contaminated by what Kathryn Bond Stockton would surely call "kid Orientalism."

In the documentary, the game is a make-believe war of pent-up frustrations linking race, nation, and manhood, one which teenage boys named Mohamed can actually win.

For a film so proud of its trail-blazing status ("the first 3D erotic movie"), 3d Sex and Zen is certainly driven by the same good old symptoms.

Hood to Coast mostly suffers from an incessant soundtrack that stuffs the film with a peppiness that blocks the tragedy of its characters from view, as well as their overcoming it.