Diego Semerene

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Going back to the scene of trauma is a familiar Latin American strategy for dealing with its wars and dictatorships through art, but The Tiniest Place takes a disturbingly literal approach to such wound-scratching homecoming.

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.

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.

The juxtaposition between the gorgeous natural beauty of a remote beach with the stubborn human need to escape somewhere, no matter what cost, is what really enthralls in the film.

A lighthearted critique on the fetishized notion of the "non-actor," the ethics (or lack thereof) of the "docudrama," and the packaging of national despair for exportation.

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.

Filmmaker Juan Manuel Echavarría's hands-off approach hinders us from mocking the believers' naïveté.

The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.

The film is a philosophical account of the shaky ground that human existence stands on.

The film finds its profundity in moments where not much is said and nothing is intellectualized, when language is stripped to its bare bones.