Jesse Cataldo

Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.

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.

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.

It’s always clear who’s right and who’s wrong, which material interests each is representing, and who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.

Ultimately crammed at a frustrating juncture between period-piece froth and seriously conceived drama, never tipping its hand toward either.

Seems to be looking for answers, but the ones it finds are too close to the surface to be satisfying.

The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.

It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.

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.

The film is eventually revealed as less interested in subverting or playing off its influences than rigorously retracing them.

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.

Kurosawa allows for a few brief flights of fancy, further abandoning realism for whimsical bursts of glowing color, but otherwise it's a humdrum slog of a voyage.

While Steve James's documentary is persuasive on an informational level, it doesn't do enough to explore the human side of its subject matter.

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

The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.

It's disheartening that, despite some half-hearted overtures toward shifting the comedy paradigm, the filmmakers make little attempt to expand their comedic palette.

The whole thing comes out feeling kind of featureless, beaten flat by its own sense of fairness.

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

It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.

A human-interest story that claims spite for human-interest stories, the film has some pretty divisive issues at its core that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.

While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.

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.

Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness.

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.

Spike Lee's version loses the one thing that really worked in the original, the sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.

It certainly suffers from the staleness of its off-the-cuff, improv-inspired mode of comedy, which prizes free-form riffing over organically constructed comedic scenarios.

Unfortunately, there's little sympathy granted to these people, and the revelation of their hidden vices comes across like an increasingly mean series of punchlines.

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.

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.

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.

The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.

While his classic hyperbolic visual style is back in force, Stone can't bother to muster any of his usual righteous anger, instead mischanneling his discontent into a kind of zen acceptance of these perpetually tiresome main characters.

The film takes on high-concept ideas that it can't sustain, and which only make its other problems more obvious.

The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.

A film whose only distinguishing characteristic is how big a mess it makes of its already meager ambitions.