Inkoo Kang

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

Though the filmmakers undoubtedly had good intentions, their ultimate point—that a long life is the result of moral rectitude—is offensive and imbecilic.

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

Aspires to be a consciousness-raising documentary but is only as deep as a tube of lipstick.

Any one-man crusade is likely to fail, but a rom-com character's war against sincerity is doomed from the start.

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.

Regrettably, the subtitles fail to capture Sul and Moon's witty wordplay — but their snappy, prickly chemistry is obvious to all.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Sjogren's promising set-up, designed to unfold with understatement, ends up feeling remote and repressed when Sjogren miscalculates by burying her characters' emotions too far down.

Billed as a comedy but nothing more than a shallow and exasperating portrait of female self-loathing, Dean Pollack's Audrey puts its protagonist through hell -- and its audience along with her.

Though Page-Lochard manages to make his passive participation in violence compelling, Around the Block remains more lecture than drama about racism and its tragic consequences.

Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.

A timid and slapdash musical.

The fatal flaw of "John Doe" is its focus on ideas, rather than people.

Part incomplete rom com, part squishy lampoon, La Boda de Valentina ultimately falls short in both modes, but accomplishes just enough to warrant a RSVP.