Jesse Cataldo

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

Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.

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.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.

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

Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.

Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.

Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.

Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.

Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.

Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.

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.

Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.

Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.

The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.

Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.

The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.

It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.

By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.

Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.

Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.

The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.

A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.

It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.

It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.

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

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

The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.

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.

It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.

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

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

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

A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.

Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.

True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.

Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.

The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.

With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.

Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.

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.

Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.

Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.

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

The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.

What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.

The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.

It defines Manoel de Oliveira's late period, during which his movies have continued to shrink in size and scope while remaining thematically expansive.

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.

After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.

Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.

By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.

It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.

This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.

Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.

It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.

As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.

The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.

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

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

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

Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt.

It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.

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 it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.

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.

Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.

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.

Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.

The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.

Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.

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

Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.

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.

A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.

There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.

Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.

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

This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.

These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.

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.

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.

Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.

A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.

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

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.

It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.

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

Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.

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.

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

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.

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

Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.

Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.

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.

More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.