Diego Semerene

The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.

Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.

The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.

For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.

For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.

Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.

Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.

François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.

The film’s tendency to over-explain, over-intellectualize, and over-script events leaves little room for spontaneity and doubt.

When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.

Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.

With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.

Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.

Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.

Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.

Despite the exuberance of the works featured, which are promptly flattened by the film's commitment to a traditional documentary blueprint, Yayoi Kusama's resilience still commands our attention.

Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.

There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.

When compared to the high-stakes dramas at the center of Paris Is Burning, where sex workers dreamed of becoming supermodels, Kiki feels rather tame.

From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.

It's an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.

The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.

It botches itself out of its own epic ambitions, an aesthetic slickness that seems to contradict, if not betray, its subject matter, and a maddeningly subdued critical spirit.

The film's educational impetus is to announce to the world that even picture-perfect Norwegians continue to pay a heavy price for the horrors of WWII.

The film never explores the depths and nuances that could actually place Jobriath in conversation with figures who came after him, however reductively.

Shana Betz's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes the film seem like empty dramatization.

In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.

Juliette Binoche's face, as we know, can tell a million stories in a simple and brief rearrangement of her facial muscles.

Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.

The film only feels interesting when it focuses on looking at what the characters aren't doing and listening to what they aren't saying.

It would have been nice if the film had surrendered to its lunacy more blatantly, more carelessly.

The film's moral lesson is too contradictory to be taken seriously.

It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.

Without a consistent stylistic playfulness to match the histrionic scenarios, the action often feels just plain silly.

Sassy Pants has a slightly ludic atmosphere akin to another tale of teen alienation, Dear Lemon Lima, but it unfolds like a fable in which only Bethany doesn't feel like a canned caricature.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.

The tension between the amateurish interviewer and the star interviewees gives the documentary a layer of authenticity that its otherwise formulaic structure and storytelling fail to find.

While The First Rasta never goes beyond the surfaces of conventional documentary making of the most average kind, its reticence becomes whimsical every time the elderly interviewees break into song soon after reminiscing.

Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.

The figure of the poor white girl whose sex work is justified by a really noble cause, set of circumstances or sheer charisma, is, of course, not a new cinematic premise.

The extreme largesse of Anselm Kiefer's project, his radical certainties and devotion, all call for a more intrusive probing.