Jesse Cataldo

While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.

While the documentary offers us a story that needs to be told, it does so in very non-Joffrey ways.

The film is ultimately draining because of the way it handles Anne, stranding a potentially dynamic character in two dueling scenarios, both of which are drab and unsurprising.

While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.

There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.

The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.

The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.

Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.

Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.

Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.

Where Spielberg has made WWII a venue for his sanctimonious side, a platform to convince viewers that war is indeed hell, Lucas is still in a state of pre-adolescent fascination with the conflict.

A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.

Like many of Agnès Varda's similarly themed explorations, the results are more than they initially seem, casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent, resulting in a film that's fueled more by compassion than curiosity.

It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.

A movie like this lives and dies by its finer details, and London Boulevard screws up by applying the same broad brush to its entire cast, meaning every character gets the same amount of shading.

As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.

Rather than organically develop its characters, it charts their evolution via silly outfit changes, treating the early '80s as a costume bin for flavor-of-the-week aping gags, with the band going from Gary Numan style shirts and skinny ties to lavish glam-rock costumes.

Covered in tattoos and clinging to wisps of their outsider status, the men profiled here seem assured of the novelty of their dilemma, as if they were the first generation to settle into a middle-class existence after a youth spent on the fringes.

You can tell a lot about the film from its rough handling of the materials supplied by its predecessor, using these commonalities both to identify the bond between the two and signal how much further it's willing to push things.

The staging of this dissociative roundelay is still presented in a forcefully lo-fi format, prizing roughly framed shots, improvisation, and flat characters, but there are ever clearer indications that Swanberg is producing something more than empty-headed slacker cinema.

Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.

The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject.

Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.

Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.

Glomming conceits and situations from a vast range of similarly themed films, it ambles along in a lethargic, good-natured manner, fitfully amusing but never approaching substantial.

A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.

Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.

The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.

Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.

There's nothing wrong with establishing a field of unlikable characters, but The Ledge not only relies on paper-thin stereotypes, it keeps its allegiances clear from the beginning.

Although it fancies itself as rigidly complex as a well-played chess match, Nick Tomnay's The Perfect Host is really a game without any rules, one where characters and situations exist in total thrall of the next shocking twist.

It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.

A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.

This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war.