Ed Gonzalez

Xan Cassavetes cops to nothing more significant than being more keen on Vampyros Lesbos than anyone else from her clan of famous cinephiles.

There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.

Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.

The film's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer.

It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.

The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.

As feminist fantasy, the film is non-committal, and as a reimagining of the fairy tale, it's at best expensive-looking without seeming wantonly so.

The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.

The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.

Despite its fascinating subject matter, Total Eclipse is both unflattering and loveless. Holland seems to care very little for the way Rimbaud and Verlaine’s crass relationship was channeled into words. Worse than DiCaprio’s accent are his and Thewlis’s ludicrous sex scenes.

A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.

As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.

Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.

Ali‘s narrative laxness comes at the fault of boxing time (a good one-third of the film’s three-hour time span is spent inside the ring). You say: But Mann knows how to direct a fight. But I say: So what?

Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.

Had we been allowed to truly sit with the characters’ prejudices, then The Damned might have earned the desperation with which it strains for contemporary resonance.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.

The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.

Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.

The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.

At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.

In the wake of Bobcat Goldthwait's Wolf Creek, Exists's metaphorical ambitions are as under-realized as its story-circumscribing use of found footage.

At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.

Mac Carter repeatedly compromises his intuitive, and often elegantly framed, glances at his main characters' teenage blues by too busily going through amateur-night gesticulations of spooking his audience.

The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.

One wishes it had spared us the remedial theorizing on media culture and artistic representation and license and less apologetically acted the part of a straight-up horror film.

Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.

In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.