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.