Joseph Jon Lanthier

The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.

In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.

A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.

The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.

Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.

Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.

The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.

Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.

Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.

Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism?

Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.

An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.

The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.

An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger.

What keeps the documentary from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved.

Structurally lopsided, the narrative jumps directly into the success of their first molded-plywood chair, and meanders from there into the numerous short films the Eames Studio made for government agencies and IT companies.

Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.

Director Nathan Christ dithers between fashioning the film as a glossing study of metropolitan personality and a virtual advertisement for the groups included.

Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.

It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.

The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.

The movie is a curious blend of teacher-appreciation mandate and recruitment video, though it's not always clear at whom the narration's gravely spoken factoids are directed.

Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.

The movie is unsurprisingly devoted to peddling up-and-comer Chris Thiele as something daring, something new.

A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant.

To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.

The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.