Jesse Cataldo

Lawless may be full of half-hearted overtures toward depth and emotional complexity, but the film's prestige sheen is mostly a sham; the real focus here is the irrepressible lure of bad behavior.

Too often Jimmy P. seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.

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.

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

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

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

If Takeshi Kitano does go forward with the rumored third volume, hopefully he'll conceive of some fresh angle on this increasingly dry material.

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

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.

Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.

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.

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.

George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.

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

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

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.

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.

Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It takes the basic form of the revenge flick and dips it in tar, making for a movie that comes out sticky, nasty, and black.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.

The film is a patient exploration of the enlaced connections between professional and emotional sectors.

Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.