Diego Semerene

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

The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If the film defies conventional form, it does so without the gravitas that conceptual cohesion brings, quickly rendering its experimentation into gratuitous aesthetic masturbation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Essentially a post-apocalyptic telenovela, it sanitizes the concept of sisterhood, and even womanhood.

Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.

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

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