Ernest Hardy

The film isn't as smart as it thinks it is, and its characters are painfully generic.

Drumming doesn't quite have the skills to finesse the varying tones demanded by his textured script...and he could have taken one more pass on smoothing out character arcs, which are too truncated to be believable in a few cases. Still, the ensemble cast is fantastic, and Drumming is a talent to watch.

It's a movie by people who lifted almost all their ideas from much better movies, and lean too heavily on "based on a true story" to pave over their film's weaknesses.

A surprisingly thoughtful, well-researched attempt to give both sides of the argument respect while illuminating the long history of tensions surrounding gun ownership in America.

It's a smart, funny, tough-minded film crammed with data and personal anecdotes, each illuminating the other, each sketching in the staggering costs—and not just financial—of the ways authorities in this country have shaped the drug issue. It's far from glib.

The film isn't as smart on the issue of race as it needs to be, and its feminist read of the music and scene feels forced in places, but as an entry-level conversation starter, it gets the job done.

Shamelessly manipulative, it's a highly effective if not very good film, its success entirely due to the talents of its cast. They bring heart to a script that is unabashedly about pushing buttons.

What makes Kuchu work as taut agitprop, and ultimately to devastating emotional effect, is that Wright and Zouhali-Worrall allow the enormity of the film's political concerns to be telegraphed through the stories, experiences, and astute analysis of ordinary queer folk and their hetero allies.

It does what the most powerful films and music have always done, which is to spark contemplation of our own lives and choices, and our place in the world, while also stoking compassion and empathy for lives far removed from our own.

Dirty Wars is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know how we wage war right now; it's also a chilling prologue for what's likely a global future of endless war and blowback.

This is powerful reportage, beautifully shot and gracefully laid out; too bad that Kendall ties it all up with more deep thoughts from the bus itself, thoughts that sound like outtakes from a TED Talk on the interconnectedness of all living things.

Ross's on-the-nose script offers little subtext or nuance, and the film—for all the inherent drama of the situation—has very little real-life grit.

A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.

Old Dog has the look and feel of a documentary, which adds senses of urgency and immediacy to a tale that moves at a languid, but never boring, pace.

The film is something of a paradox, simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, its ending tethered to both bruised triumph and a sense of things falling apart.

What Venus and Serena does extraordinarily well is capture the work ethic and undersung smarts of the sisters while taking viewers deep into their enviably close relationship.

What saves the film—and grandly—is Nance’s wildly ambitious visual imagination. Teetering somewhere between film school precocity and impressively assured audaciousness...It’s almost hypnotic in its style and genre promiscuity.

Striking the right balance between interior and exterior can mean the difference between compelling drama and accidental melodrama. Writer-director Ron Morales just misses equilibrium in the visually arresting Filipino thriller Graceland.

The roles of affect and artifice in mediating the realities of racism, homophobia, and poverty are perhaps the true subjects of Shirley Clarke's landmark doc.

This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.

Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.

The images of the style as it evolves, and especially those that fill the last 15 minutes of "Tattoo", are so beautiful and often majestic that they overshadow the film's small shortcomings.

A well-crafted if structurally generic documentary.

Uneven acting by the cast and a script that could have used at least one more overhaul to synthesize its elements (the love story is so flimsily mapped out as to be unbelievable) cripple Saulter's ambitions, but the energy of the film pulls you in and holds you through its tragic ending.

Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.

It’s a moving tale made more so because even after he’s “won,” Pineda maintains a clear-eyed pragmatism about what living a fairy tale costs.

One marvel of the film is how it conveys so much information so quickly, and with such accessibility.

Volumes are said about class, assimilation, and the ways the assimilated sometimes shame and scar those who haven't shorn themselves of ethnic or racial signifiers. There is pungency in this shorthand, in these sketches that are richly evocative without saying too much or giving too little. You can't help but wish the movie had more of it.

Karpovsky is unsettlingly good as Paul, and Newman's Danielle is sexy and layered.

Beautifully filmed but written without the psychological depth or sleight of hand of the best thrillers.

The film would have been more powerful if it also included a man or woman who wasn't lovable once you got to know him or her--maybe one of the young crack or meth addicts whose violent demeanors, as explained by an old-timer, have considerably shifted the dynamics of street life.

The costumes are gorgeous, and the settings are plush, but the acting is merely serviceable, and the film lacks either the wit or the energy of its predecessors. Long before it ends, you find yourself indifferent to the fate of the mismatched lovebirds or anyone else in the tale.

Beautifully shot, the film is unapologetically a crowd-pleaser whose gentleness of tone flows from its subject.

It takes a minute for the film to move beyond a kind of gilded stasis, but once it does, it - and Plummer - are riveting.

The appeal of Lunch might be limited to Hollywood-nostalgia buffs, but they will be enthralled not only by the stories told, but also how they're told. These guys are still some of the sharpest wits in town.

From its low-key, guitar-based score by composer Chris Bacon to the filmmaker's refusal to sugar-coat the tough times some of the soldiers faced after completing the climb, High Ground takes its cues from the worldview of its subjects.

The result often plays more like a satire of the fashion industry than a serious look at one of the humans inside it.

Though not must-see cinema, it is entertaining and affecting.

Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.

What follows is a film as odd as its title character. Timothy flings grown-up ideas at the viewer but rips the teeth from them rather than risk our discomfort.

The whole thing can be hard to follow, but the energy (and pulchritude) of the cast make it a perfectly fine bit of popcorn escapism.

Directed by Garner, Craigslist Joe is sweet, moving, and frustrating.

The film's emotional and psychological textures suffer for those losses, but Family is still riveting viewing.

Although it's grotesque to see pre-teens stomping in underground warehouse-battle settings, at least Battlefield America's racial politics are interesting.

The film, directed by Jesse Baget, aims to be a satiric look at racism but at every turn flaunts the laws of logic and believability.

There are so many complicated political, religious, and cultural issues swirling around Yoni's story, and Follow Me keeps them on the sidelines. It is pure hagiography.

A loving, exhaustive, warts-and-all look at the man who spent years battling his own alcoholism before a spiritual experience in the hospital set him on the course to help others.

Renton's competing tones and intentions result in a film at odds with itself and its lead performance.

Tim eventually evolves out of smugness, but unfortunately, the film merely trades it for sappiness. Fischer, meanwhile, imbues Janice with a wounded soulfulness that cuts right through the clichés. The less said about a hideously wigged Topher Grace as a smarmy self-help author, the better.

Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.

The fact that real-life deadly racial animus in America is often cartoonish in its manifestation doesn't excuse Deadline's cliché-ridden characterizations of bigotry. Worse, the film has no pulse and no dramatic tension, despite its subject matter. It's a slog to get to its big revelations.

A deceptively simple film, gingerly peels layer after layer of sharp insights into the dynamics of familial love, using compassion and droll humor as its tools. Its strength is that it manages to tap genuine emotion without succumbing to sentimentality.

The film trots out a who's who of great thinkers - Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, assorted scientists and historians - who are riveting as they walk us through the question of whether we will or can survive progress. The anticapitalism prognosis is grim, and the hope offered is slim indeed.

Buff gels into a surprisingly moving look at the machinations of the heart.

Lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans's Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype.

Filmed over a period of six weeks and supplemented with animated music sequences and chilling news footage of the terrifying deluge, Pray is both an elegy and a love letter.

Marston nails the claustrophobia of small-town life and the turbulent emotionalism of teenagers, but what pushes the film toward sublimity is the way he delicately captures all of the characters' inner lives as their world slowly crumbles.

Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.

Fascinating and often devastating.

What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.

Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.

Even those who closely follow African (or global) politics will likely be bowled over by the real-life plot twists unfolding before Merz's camera. What makes the film especially resonate now is the frustration with the status quo that is consistently voiced by the people on the street.

The film's scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP's origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.

It's the mind-blowing performance footage (and there's lots of it) that makes this a must-see film.

At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.

A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.

A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.

What's made powerfully clear is that we've reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents.

But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.

The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.

Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.

That's why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep as hers.

These subplots hint at what could have been, nudging the film toward biting rather than obvious commentary on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and creativity, and the costs of thwarting expression of any of them. But Féret barely explores this, and the film suffers for it.

In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.

In many ways reminiscent of "Mesrine" but suffers greatly in comparison. It hits many of the same marks -- but the scenes unfold almost elliptically, never really building or illuminating character, and never sparking narrative momentum.

Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."

The script is often ludicrous (gratuitous digs at feminism; muddled commentary on war and the military), the sets look like sets, and the acting-aside from Helsham and Plunkett-doesn't even rise to the level of student films.

Shearer builds an airtight case to prove his thesis, and one of his most chilling arguments is a roll call of brave souls whose lives and careers have been systematically wrecked in pursuit of the truth.

The movie floats to another realm entirely when the cameras go into the home of Nova Venerable, a smart, eloquent, gorgeous girl whose love for her special-needs younger brother and their hardworking single mom is expressed in terms that sidestep the formulaic verbal and physical bombast of so many of her peers.

The cast is uniformly good, but Isabelle Blais especially stands out as Natalie.

Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.

A substandard romantic comedy gussied up in Indian drag.

Fly Away could have been stronger if its antiseptic visual style, which anchors it in old-fashioned TV movie mode, had been more adventurous in shouldering some of the weight of depicting the emotional and psychic anguish of the story.

Circo is filled with beautiful images and haunting moments, especially in the third act, when the family unravels as the film culminates in a final triumphant, haunting image.

The supporting cast is uniformly fine, but the film rests on the delicate shoulders of Bonnaire, who carries it with a soulful, magnetic presence.

As the film works toward its negative Eden ending, having illustrated just how little a life is worth, one of its most potent points is how brutally destabilizing hope can be when despair has become the norm.

The entire cast is in fine form (Omari Hardwick, as Maye's maybe-suitor, pushes the sexual heat through the roof), but White's blistering performance sears the screen.

It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.

Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon Lemmy Kilmister will be in heaven watching this gushing love letter to the man who straddles rock subgenres, but anyone who's not already a fan will cry for mercy long before the nearly two-hour film ends.

Characters make choices that are incredibly stupid, even wildly offensive, but also recognizably human, and as the night spirals out of control Cannon demonstrates a strong hand in controlling the mayhem. He also sets himself up as a filmmaker to watch.

Less forgivable is the fact that this is a film in which characters are flung out of character solely for cheap laughs and rarely actually listen or talk to one another.

David John Swajeski, who directed, produced, and edited this documentary on the fledgling fashionista, snags his film on clichés, poor pacing, and an unwillingness or inability to push his subject beyond talk-show pop-psych babble when the topic is interior life and wounds.

When Boote gets out of the way, the film is illuminating and infuriating.

Negroponte's visuals are Doc 101-he simply points and shoots. But that doesn't matter; the life stories told (particularly Dimitri's) and the experiences of coming clean sell themselves.

In her tale of a brusque, prickly young Dutch woman who inexplicably cuts herself off from the world, except for a heavily circumscribed relationship with a man whose isolation is less voluntary, writer-director Urszula Antoniak hits a lot of expected notes.

The film lacks a pulse. There's sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.

Undertow, is sublime. Set in a small, picturesque Peruvian fishing village, it's less a coming-out tale than a magic realism–infused coming-of-consciousness love story.

The film powerfully hits the note of universalism that is its goal; haven't many of us fallen for someone that we, they, and the world deem out of our league?