Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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

We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.

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.

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.

Hood to Coast mostly suffers from an incessant soundtrack that stuffs the film with a peppiness that blocks the tragedy of its characters from view, as well as their overcoming it.

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.

Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.

One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.

As an auteur film, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario inhabits a kind of beyond, because instead of presenting a world filtered through his subjective lens, the filmmaker allows the viewer inside his very subjectivity.