Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.

The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.

It's difficult to believe in Ryder's gullibility, if not willingness to be caught in his uncle's strange web of provocations.

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

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

The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.

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.