Inkoo Kang

A documentary that's admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure.

Grainily shot but radiating life, The Amazing Catfish is an enormously affecting portrait of a family in crisis that dares to hope.

First-time writer-director Jocelyn Towne takes an admirably novel stab at familial dysfunction in her father-daughter drama I Am I, but she proves unable to keep the film's originality from rapidly curdling into preposterousness.

If there isn't enough to feel, at least there's a lot to look at. Thanks to the superb 3-D direction by DeBlois, we swoop through the air, whoosh down dragons’ tails, and juuust baaaarely squeeze into small crevices, but still, those experiences are only like being on a really great rollercoaster — they don't mean anything.

First-time Spanish director Jorge Dorado aims for Hitchcock and misses by a mile with Anna.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

A few of the self-referential gags get recycled one too many times, but an exuberant buoyancy — and the belly-laugh-a-minute pacing of the jokes — makes 22 Jump Street a hilarious highpoint of an already quite funny summer season.

Director-star Livia De Paolis sets out to reassure everybody that the Internet won't destroy all relationships in her agreeable but unnecessary family drama Emoticon ;).

Garriga aims for depth in the third act, contextualizing religious conservatism as a reaction against the social revolutions of the 1960s. But the reduction of Christianity into just another political group feels like a dilution, a conversion of wine into water.

Blended director Frank Coraci, a Happy Madison vet, is too much of a company man to elevate this passion-phobic rom-com beyond something more than an above-average Sandler production.

The gratingly underdeveloped plot has all the dramatic effect of a toddler with her hands behind her back chirping, "Guess what I've got?" for more than an hour.

Personal or not, this lazy fantasy doesn't offer many more pleasures than an Instagram account.

What makes Neighbors exceptional, rather than merely great, is its successful attempt to reinvent the studio comedy.

Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin, this ostensible femme-powerment film is strangely unsympathetic, even demeaning, to its target audience. Rather than pandering to moms, this unfunny, unabashedly anti-feminist comedy consistently points out how wrong or unnecessary or ungrateful they are.

Wallace smartly leaves room for skeptics of Burpo's account to maintain their doubt; what matters most is that audiences understand the film character's reasons for choosing to believe his son's vision/dream/delirium.

Banks seems to hope that merely spending time with her subject will somehow create an illusion of intimacy. But her film's secretive opacity only makes Callahan a little prince, far away on his own planet.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

The invitingly loud Melendez posits herself as both a victimized failure and a triumphantly persevering pioneer, and though one can certainly be both, the film doesn't say anything new or meaningful about the industry she's been dying to join for the last two decades.

Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

The parkour is breathtaking and the plot twists are off-the-charts ridiculous.

Shot in '70s naturalism, the film's cinematography only invites unfavorable comparisons to the more ambitious, psychologically searching interpersonal dramas of that era.

The virgin-whore dichotomy between the two female characters flattens the film into something much less interesting than it could have been, and the tonal discrepancies occasionally threaten to take it into experimental territory.

Potrykus offers a variety of intriguing suggestions about the relationship between laughter and violence, performance and destruction.

It's time to return this old painting to the attic.

Its core dance styles are a wonderfully frenetic fusion of tap and hip-hop and a truly novel blend of Japanese taiko drumming and K-pop girl-group choreography. Whenever actor Derek Hough and BoA stop leaping and twirling, though, Make Your Move is an underwritten mess.

Whatever Proxy lacks in narrative cohesion and psychological realism, it makes up for in its compelling fever-dream quality and its probing questions about the darker side of parenting.

The exhausted mockumentary genre provides yet another reason for its demise in Authors Anonymous, a tenaciously unfunny comedy.

A repetitive, sluggishly paced nocturnal rumination on why we bother reuniting with old friends we purposefully left behind.

An unconvincing, poorly conceived hybrid of end-of-the-world thriller and relationship drama.

Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.

The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.

So many phrases out of characters' mouths are as overused and flavorless as a thrice-steeped tea bag, and yet a sturdy narrative structure, increasing thematic complexity and finely detailed performances from Aidan Quinn and Taylor Schilling make writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld's sophomore effort an agreeably pensive experience.

There isn't the faintest glimmer of lived experience to be found here, not the briefest flash of truth.

[A] numbingly inert series of dirty-cop clichés that abruptly builds to an ephemerally poignant climax.

The social construction of illness is certainly a worthy topic, but Carter situates his characters far from any semblance of a plot and even further from his heart.

Although Kaveh and Raul never transcend their archetypes as heartbroken single guy and too-comfortable married man, and Hamedani and Isao aren't naturals in front of the camera, their rapport ultimately makes Junk a worthwhile lark.

Salva manages a few inspired scenes... But the lasting image Dark House offers is of the screenwriters hurling everything they can think of at the wall.

In the thoughtful and touching coming-of-age tale The Cold Lands, writer-director Tom Gilroy examines self-reliance as a philosophy and way of life.

Never feels as triumphant or as affecting as it should, but the script boasts some amusing meanness of spirit.

Lovering keeps In Fear visually absorbing through unsettling close-ups and a well-paced series of scares.

A vital, urgent and infuriating look at the devastating failures of the juvenile court system and the insidious reach of prison privatization.

Director Peggy Holmes' glittery romp offers plenty of pretty spectacles, but true flights of fancy... are far too rare.

In adapting Dean Koontz's series, Sommers nails the hero but bungles the world-building.

Though it boasts great performances and urgent, intimate camera work, "Holy Ghost People" diminishes as it progresses, enervated by its prioritization of scares over cohesion and a voice-over that tells everything it should show.

It's so predictable in its beats and pedestrian in its execution that a viewer can slip in and out of consciousness, confident she won't miss much and will know exactly where in the story she is when she awakes.

The emotional moments never land.

The happenstance plotting and over-reliance on violence as a plot motor dissipate the film's energy by the end.

The Attorney is on the side of justice, but it's a ham-fisted dramatization of real-life events that mistakes anger for persuasion.

It's an ominous, claustrophobic, unhappily sapphic work whose thunderclap of a climax instills terror and awe of the fates' petty, whimsical cruelties.

Frequently affecting and mordantly funny, Somewhere Slow acquits Gilsig as a gifted actress and a producer with great taste.

The film is rescued from its own lumbering self-seriousness by Weber's sensitive portrayal of teen dynamics, but it's never as scary or as creepy as it needs to be.

Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.

[An] eager-to-please but creaky and shambling movie.

Chen's excessive propriety veers treacherously close to barely disguised repulsion.

Director Trevor White frames the former teen gang member's life as an uplifting coming-of-age prison drama that feels entirely disconnected from the realities of incarceration.

It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.

The two stunning set pieces, both involving car chases, are so inspired and teeth-grittingly determined that they make the case for the possibility of individual heroism in a harrowingly venal world.

Raze is a sweaty, queasy, bruising experience — and a superbly crafted film.

Desiccated by its pretensions, it's freeze-dried melodrama.

Truth is hammier than Easter brunch, but its depictions of rejection transfiguring into violence are always affecting and distressing.

A compelling portrait of Japan's stagnant economy and its disheartening effect on younger workers.

Beyond this general outline, plot and character development are afterthoughts, or maybe never-thoughts.

The film's lack of momentum makes the pace stultifyingly slow, but it's the script's reliance on the musty Wise Indian trope that makes "Dancing" dead on arrival.

Devastating in its simplicity and honesty, The Selfish Giant is a colossus of feeling.

[A] tediously naturalistic and fairly pointless no-budget indie about the compromises of middle-aged femininity.

The French chamber dramedy What's in a Name is frequently delightful, full of ribald humor and compelling, intelligent debate.

The mustiness of many of the script's ideas hardly detracts from what feels like a radical premise, at least in film — that a woman can get off with a stranger and leave it at that. Erica Jong would be proud.

Walker never has Pearce explain why he wants to return the lifts, and he never has to. The heights speak for themselves.

The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.

Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.

S#x Acts works as a crash course in sexual ethics, but it also fails to transcend its genre trappings as a morality tale about the dangers of low self-esteem.

Spong's documentary isn't a beautiful film... Its value, rather, is archival.

Walker's life is so eventful — and her contributions so important — that the hagiography is worth forgiving.

The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.

As a whole, the film's characters touchingly illustrate the tolls of living with unresolved trauma and chronic uncertainty, as well as the solidarity and relative freedom this community of outcasts enjoys.

The great achievement in writer-director Jono Oliver's poignant, superb debut, Home, lies in the balance between the film's empathy for those like Jack who seek independence and its compassion for others who may need care indefinitely.

This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.

For most of its run, the film is a tribute to unimaginative competence, confidently venturing where so many movies have ventured before. But in the last few scenes, the script offers a solid twist and a cynical social critique, the latter coming out of nowhere but still somehow managing to work.

Bledsoe leads an impressive cast, but there's only so much the actors can do with writer-director Tony Glazer's underdeveloped script.

The grande dame's performance, alternately goofy and grave, is an absolute tour de force.

The lions are majestic yet adorable; too bad the humans are such a sorry sight.

LaBeouf and Wood don't clang, but they don't quite click, either. That's not enough for the film to persuade us of its message, that love is worth any sacrifice.

The film's overall narrative is one of rocky but steady progress.

A Case of You is a disappointing romantic comedy that aspires to social relevance until the third act, when it settles for pat Freudian revelations.

Director Junya Sakino's debut would have been stronger if the comic barbs in Jeff Mizushima's script hadn't been dulled by Mizushima's editing, which bungles the timing of the jokes.

This somber work about the worthiness of living has little life in it.

When I Walk is extraordinarily accomplished, poignant, and wise.

Hoover's stubbornly ground-level perspective renders the documentary's lack of context about HIV in India...rather frustrating. But Blood Brother feels important anyway, not so much as a snapshot of one volunteer but for its passionate portrayal of the curative powers of love.

A love letter to that singular intersection of artistic innovation, cultural legacy, community pride, and family-sustaining (or -straining) commerce known as the restaurant.

The Paw Project is robustly persuasive, with Conrad compellingly framing her crusade as a battle between a right-thinking vet and a deep-pocketed industry group that purportedly represents her.

False gravity weighs down 2 Jacks, a father-son drama less interested in exploring familial relations than in tut-tutting the millennials.

It's frustrating that the filmmakers could only think to enrich the characters of one race by demeaning those of another.

Because The Institute is largely framed as if the viewer were a co-player in Jejune's game, the film is an experience that's fun and frustrating in equal measure.

That Rosa never encounters another character with English fluency — nor grasps her Eurocentric limitations — makes director Threes Anna's film less the intended portrait of cultural isolation than an illustration of how a lack of imagination can lead to despair.

For the first hour, the plot is stultifyingly aimless, while the satire of Disney's oppressive optimism is as stale as any theme-park snack. But like a roller coaster, a queasily rollicking and dizzyingly loopy climax... ultimately makes the long wait worthwhile.