Jesse Cataldo

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.

Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.

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

Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.

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