Jessica Kiang

It’s less a convincing, involving narrative than an episodic picaresque that rambles loose-jointedly from absurdist encounter to vaguely fable-like incident.

Desplechin lashes storylines and filmmaking gimmickry in to the one ginormous stewpot with gusto, slams the lid down on it and promptly forgets to turn on the heat. [Cannes Version]

The story is bloated and episodic (the film's 2h 18m length doesn't help the pacing), and remarkably unengaging for what should be emotionally epic.

Ex-Husbands . . . is likable enough in intention, but flounders en route to its destination. Not unlike its befuddled protagonists, who can’t seem to translate meaning well into doing well.

Using its characters' memories, loyalties and resentments as vehicles, Return to Ithaca gently expands our understanding of life within a society that, in contrast to our own, did not even pretend to cultivate the idea that its citizens were free.

There’s a storybook complacency to Garbarski’s filmmaking (indeed the literal translation of the German title is “Once Upon a Time in Germany”) that gives us the impression that all this is snow-globe history, put away behind glass on a shelf somewhere.

Challenging, complex and frequently ugly, Paradise: Love is a ruthless exploration of how unlike our everyday selves we can behave when we’re "on holiday," and how much that illuminates who we really are.

As much fun as it is to watch Lee beat people up and strut around in shiny pinstripe suits, it’s just as much of a pleasure to watch him think it all through.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Though it occasionally brushes up against intricate ideas about memory and memorialization — who gets to be commemorated, who must not and the genesis of the “never forget” ethos — June Zero itself leaves a quickly fading impression.

Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.

Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.

Thomsen builds a fascinating film around a fascinating man, but never, despite his evident deep affection for him, allows it to fall into hagiography.

Bleak, brutal and unrelentingly nihilist, and with only sporadic flashes of the blackest, most mordant humor to lighten the load, it feels parched, like the story has simply boiled away in the desert heat and all that’s left are its desiccated bones. In a good way.

Les Nôtres” remains — right up to its tight, repressed ending — a deeply disquieting, superbly performed evocation of a very banal sort of evil.

Colours of Time doesn’t want to surprise so much as to please, and the multiple, largely antagonist-free storylines are just charming enough to keep the absence of real conflict from becoming a problem.

It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.

The film is based on screenwriter Catherine Léger’s play, and perhaps the herky-jerk structure works on stage. On screen, however, it just feels undisciplined, as its Quentin Dupieux-style visual drollery never quite gels with its more obvious, broadly smutty farce.

Heady, bold statements about humankind are both the film’s best aspect and its chief flaw: There are just so many of them.

The purposely messy, garish and disposable comedy from Bridesmaids writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who also star as the fortysomething Midwesterners of the title, is so determinedly low-stakes that to quibble with its candy-colored craving to be liked is to be a terrible killjoy.

A set-your-watch-by-it riff on the unlikely-friendship-helps-two-lonely-people formula, this time involving a troubled schoolgirl and a stage magician, it is however so nicely performed and takes such honest pleasure in the flourishes of its little magic show, that only a hard heart would mention that the palmed coins and hidden cards of its construction were visible all along.

Still best known as Hurley from “Lost,” Garcia quietly electrifies here in a role that feels like a breakout; for all the film’s superior craft and unsettling atmosphere-building, it is his sympathetic soulfulness that delivers the most resonant harmonics.

Salvatore Totino's crisp 3D photography and Kormakur's way with a clear, fluid, thrilling action sequence show off the mountain in immensely impressive ways. But the humans involved get short shrift.

So much does not connect here and so much is designed to discomfit that there is unexpected resonance when Alverson lays aside the scabrousness and puts down oddball drollery to remind us that inside every lonely young man, there’s a shivering kid waiting to be picked up and brought in from the snow.

What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances.

A loving and in fact overly adulatory genre film which is not so much a take on the revenge Western as a deeply faithful recreation of it, at times so faithful as to veer dangerously close to pastiche.

Handsomely shot, evocatively designed, solidly cast and terribly daft, it also presents your friendly neighborhood reviewer with something of a challenge. With what seems like almost premeditated skill, it saves its worst instincts for the backend of its convoluted and barely credible narrative, a good arm-and-a-half’s-length beyond the impassible “spoiler wall.”

Niccol’s film takes a somber, nuanced and compelling look at the War on Terror as it is waged by U.S. drone pilots, right up until a final five minutes that, in a shower of pat resolutions and conclusions, delivers something of a surgical strike on the its credibility.