Jesse Cataldo

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.