Diego Semerene

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.

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

Its lightheartedness and overtly traditional narrative structure become a smart strategy for crafting what is ultimately a very nuanced political critique of capital.

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.

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

It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat like a muffled scream.

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

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

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

Though it begins with the aesthetic and conceptual rigor of Blade Runner, it quickly veers toward the gratuitous outlandishness of a Bruce La Bruce film.

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

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.

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

Only Marisa Tomei’s face can compete with Isabelle Huppert’s ability to turn even the sappiest of scenarios into a nuanced tour de force.

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

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

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.

A raw, sophisticated, and stomach-turning look at what it means to be a young woman in Serbia, what it means to be a woman tout court.

The film’s mid-act about-face lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Despite its initially familiar trajectory, Another End disarmingly and purposefully sweeps us away on a wave of apathy not unlike that which plagues its main character, challenging our sense of who we fundamentally are as humans.

The hilarity of the film creeps up slowly and from every angle, not through the facile immediacy of short-lived laughter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's the moments when director Alan Brown stops worrying about clarifying plot and character motivation and lets the performances bring those into being that makes this an authentic project.

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

At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.

It's to Carine Roitfeld's own credit and director Fabien Constant's funky and frenetic pacing that the doc feels neither like a corporate hagiography nor like mere fashionista masturbation material.

It's Jonathan Caouette's insistence in going back to his nightmarish old footage, or the old footage that he purposefully renders nightmarish, that seems more interesting.

The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.

Director Casper Andreas does a good job conserving a simultaneous sense of disgust and attraction for the way big-city dreams end up stripping off wannabes from everything but their bodies.

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.

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.

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.

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

While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.

Autoerotic's take on the me-me-me generation's inability for actual contact seems appropriate, but it lacks the nuance that makes "Denise Calls Up" so delicious to watch.

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

It chooses the delicateness of a fable instead of the narrative recklessness we've come to expect from Bruce La Bruce.

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

Jimpa’s exploration of non-binary identity ultimately proves superficial.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

W.E.'s is a kind of dynamic pleasure that allows for non-shameful identification with the feminine and a fantasy of becoming what we see.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.