Diego Semerene

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.