Jesse Cataldo

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

The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.