Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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

Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.

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

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