Jesse Cataldo

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Polisse has been compared to "The Wire," but beyond a shared interest in the Sisyphean nature of police work, the two are mostly comparable as inverses of each other.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.