Joseph Jon Lanthier

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.

Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.

Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.

The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.

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

Following the faux-opiate flecked suit of docs like One Fast Move or I'm Gone, The Beat Hotel can't quite rise above its obvious desire to appeal to the former demographic in spite of their apparently limited patience for historical exegesis.

The camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.

Much of this content, which involves complex social movements in Burma, Iran, and elsewhere, is necessarily abridged, but it's often done so to the point of incoherence, making Gene Sharp's connection to what we're seeing seem contrived.

Oh, the things that money can buy.

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.

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

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.

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.

Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa's inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible.

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.

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

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.

Despite the fact that Goodall narrates the bulk of the material, there are scant details about her concrete contributions to animal and life science save for her observing of chimp-made tools.

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

Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.

The testimony we hear from suspects' neighbors and similarly curious media underlings feels muted, like a halfhearted repetition.

A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.

The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.

Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.

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

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

It lulls us into its reckless passivity to the point that even the comedic duds possess a languid hint of funny.

What's most disappointing about Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is how it fails to deliver on the hybridizing NYC gimmickry of its title.