Elise Nakhnikian

The film’s visceral pleasures often work at cross purposes with the cerebral message of the manifestos.

There's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.

The obstacles and opportunities that Patti encounters are often rote, but her struggles and triumphs are detailed with a gravity that honors and elucidates her feelings.

Nearly everything in Taylor Hackford's tin-eared comedy is as ersatz as the Robert De Diro character's rage is real.

Finding the drama and humor in everyday situations like these isn't easy, but Avedisian makes it look as natural as swinging on a vine.

The film is a debater with some interesting points to make but no overall argument to contain them.

The central characters' dogged refusal to cede their places on a team that keeps trying to reject them is a moving display of heroism.

Michael Keaton's powerful performance in The Founder is marooned in a wishy-washy story.

Warren Beatty's portrayal of Howard Hughes has the overly polished feel of an anecdote that's been told too often.

The film reveals the erudition and shrewd self-awareness that Jim Osterberg drew on to become Iggy Pop.

It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.

Jared Hess's film turns out to be a succession of failed jokes punctuated by a few cathartic laughs.

The frequent contemptuousness the film displays toward its characters keeps the audience at arm's length.

The film's ruefully honest tone is periodically drowned out by the blare of stagey coincidences.

The Panamanian-born Roberto Duran's story has all the makings of a fascinating film, but Hands of Stone isn't it.

The film champions coddling people like Florence Foster Jenkins and treats critical thinking as the enemy.

Like the work it illuminates, the doc feels formally impeccable yet utterly unstaged, a vivid distillation of a distinct and precious life.

Relevant facts about each character are dutifully punched out, in earnest speeches or actions that are often wildly overdrawn.

Its clunky incidents of exposition leave us with no real understanding of what anyone is thinking or feeling.

Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.

It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.

Most of the film's characters are unconvincing, flattened out by Charlie's self-focused lens.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria's film is an unconvincing character study that plays like a painfully unfunny sitcom.

There's real texture and emotional heft to the central relationship between the siblings, but that's thanks more to the actors than the script.

Despite the occasional cliché, this film mostly feels as messy as life, and as movingly complicated.

The film's horror is spookily and movingly expressive of the tenuous position of women in 1980s Iran.

The premise is undermined by the film's occasionally dubious ethics and its tendency to soft-pedal the dangerous situations it sets up.

Situations and people are sketched out too lightly to leave an emotional trace.

The film doesn't do much to satirize the spy genre, instead using its flimsy plot mostly as a scaffolding for a barrage of jokes.

Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.

This is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens's elegant riposte to Hitler's racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The film is a thinly dramatized series of arguments against, then ultimately in favor of the medication of bipolar disorder.

The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."

The film doles out a shock or hits a (usually hollow) emotional note every few minutes with mechanical precision.

It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.

It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.

Everything in the by-the-numbers script signals that Adam must transform himself from and abusive tyrant in the kitchen to the head of a loving and fully functional family.

The film's episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.

Less a character study than an impressionistic portrait of a troubled artist's internal chaos, it supplies just enough Miles Davis to leave us jonesing for more.

The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.

The allure of the road not taken and Saoirse Ronan's performance exert a powerful pull.

The film functions as a love letter to Pakistan, despite the misogynistic culture it exposes.

The film is only slightly dependent on the self-pity that informed Asia Argento's last effort, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it feels similarly airless.

In this picaresque documentary, the lightly comic musings of a likeable, somewhat nerdy Indian-American actor go surprisingly deep.

The film focuses on Nathan's emotions and backstage dramas in ways that generally feel forced or inauthentic.

The film all leads to a melodramatic climax that wraps up the main character's explosive acting out in a too-neat package.

A Bourne movie turned just askew enough to be funny, American Ultra trains a bemused eye on a trope ripe for a ribbing.

It has generous lashings of Aardman Animations' trademark warmth, visual inventiveness, and satisfying Claymation tactility.

Breaking the laws of human nature is an ancient comic convention, but it only works when it leads to a laugh.

Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.

Any hope of meaningful reflection or insight is doused by a steady drip of often redundant and banal observations.

Robert Duvall's evident admiration for his wife are typical of this film, in which so much seems touchingly sincere but clumsily expressed.

A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.

A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.

Highly polished yet never quite slick, it devolves now and then into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters.

The cumulative effect is cheerily life-affirming, a bracing infusion of macaque-style joie de vivre.

The chemistry between Pacino and his cast mates gives this lightly amusing contrivance surprising emotional resonance.

True to its title, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical novel has the loosely structured, unfiltered feel of a young person's diary.

An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.

Like its predecessor, the film is a charming example of what great actors can do with mediocre material.

The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.

As is often the case in films like this, Seventh Son is at its weakest when it tries to leaven its brink-of-disaster gravity with a little nerdy humor.

The film is a study of grief that drowns in a cold bath of grim self-pity.

Empowerment porn for those who long for the Cold War's clarity of purpose and American dominance in this murky age of terror.

Paolo Virzì's Human Capital gives the tired trope of cutting between overlapping stories a welcome shot of adrenaline, using it not just to compare and contrast tangentially related stories, but to show how people caught up in their private dramas can overlook or misinterpret the people around them.

The film isn't preachy, but its indie-movie artiness sometimes get in the way of its noble mission, making us think more about the techniques being used than the effects they're meant to create.

Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.

If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the universal mysteries and verities of life, The Color of Time is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger's family album.

The documentary is hesitant to show the great work that resulted from Hayao Miyazaki's "grand hobby," never including clips from the classics referred to throughout.

It's mercifully free of the ruin-porn shots that turn so many contemporary films about struggling cities into self-consciously arty exercises in the romanticization of decay.

The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.

Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.

The actors create emotionally coherent and sympathetic characters from a collection of often contradictory, monumentally irresponsible, or just plain improbable actions.

It intriguingly invites us to think about the mundane forces that can drive a seemingly ordinary guy like Mohamed to do something so desperate and cruel as piracy.

The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.

Israel Horovitz's film is basically a three-character play without a single character you can believe in.

The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.

It comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft of this movie soon after graduating high school.

The film is rife with tired food metaphors and plot twists so predictable you see them coming like travelers on the poplar-lined street that leads to the dueling restaurants.

The film is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes, but it's also a witness to the limits of that power.

Even at 74 minutes, the documentary comes to feel arduous in its recycling of the same points and imagery, the filmmaking as plodding as its subject is polished.

Nabil Ayouch's film allows us see how young suicide bombers--"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them--might deserve our pity.

The film gets too caught up in the semi-farcical comings and goings of the two Sophies and Ethans to explore any of the issues it raises about relationships very deeply.

The film's segments move seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.

In Lucía Puenzo's film, things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.

This is a study of a man who's hard to like, harder to dismiss, and impossible to pigeonhole.

A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."

Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment.

It feeds the warrior fantasies of adolescent boys with a testosterone-heavy tale of a war free of moral complications.

Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.

This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.

The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.

Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.

From its title to its closing caress, Mads Matthiesen's film skates perilously close to the cliff's edge of mawkish sentiment.

Disney draws a big fat bullseye on the fast-growing infertile-couple demographic with this airless misfire.

It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.

A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.