Keith Uhlich

This is a life lived, perhaps not always well, but certainly to the fullest.

About as deep as a kiddie pool, which isn't to say it's an unpleasant frolic.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.

Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect.

David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.

The director races far too quickly to get to his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust punch line. This is the film of a pretender, not a believer.

The running time may make you blanch, but Connie Field’s seven-part documentary about the history and eventual dissolution of South African apartheid is well worth the commitment.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

If Jim Jarmusch’s languorous, laconic style isn’t your bag, his stone-faced vampire comedy won’t make you a believer. Those who’ve already been bitten, however, will swoon like the film’s toothy leads whenever their lips touch neck juice.

Schimberg confidently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (more than once a scene that appears to be real is actually fiction and vice versa), though never to the point that it detracts from the people onscreen.

Bong is so concerned with whodunit that his creaky genre mechanics diminish Kim's determined performance.

Hopper keeps things light and off-the-cuff, allowing his performers free rein - sometimes too much, as in the case of the screechy and shrill Farrell - to explore grim territory without falling into heavy-handedness.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

Loznitsa would have done better to embrace the story’s enigmas as opposed to explicate them.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

This is derivative if well-executed product, except when it comes to the relationship at the film’s center.

Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.

The movie feels like too much of a lark. To paraphrase the play’s voice of reason, Friar Francis, it would be better if Whedon paused awhile and let his counsel sway us more.

Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.

It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.

There's more than a few things off in this tale of a disillusioned professional thief (Affleck, dull), his unlikely inamorata (Hall, wasted) and the determined FBI agent (Hamm, solid) out to apprehend him.

It’s another fascinating entry in the director’s ongoing exploration of the sadistic and masochistic facets of human behavior.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

A dream, indeed. Sure to delight foodies and cinephiles alike.

A study in simplicity, perhaps too much so. The writer-director is working in the same patiently observant vein as Argentine confederate Lisandro Alonso (Liverpool), especially in the intriguing early scenes, where the adults communicate mostly through furtive glances and expertly modulated body language.

Filho so completely calculates his causes and effects, even going so far as to have the villain of the piece literally swimming with sharks, that you never fully feel the senses-altering charge of a truly impassioned polemic.

Polanski has made a genre piece with a verve and vitality that’s in sadly short supply.

Christopher Isherwood’s seminal queer novel deserves a film adaptation that captures both its sense of place and its activist spirit. Cowriter-director Tom Ford settles for the glossy ephemera of a Vanity Fair cover spread.

Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.

A complex final scene — in which everyone finally lets the tears flow — only deepens the sense that well-meaning mother love can be as poisonous as it is nourishing.

Though the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

At one point, Tsemel describes herself as a member of an occupying force and defines her mission in life as to somehow rectify the resultant power imbalance. The only way to get there, as the film's pointed final image suggests, is to keep on trudging.

There’s a sense that all the thematic messiness is intentional, a way for Jia to diagnose the ills of a country whose economic and social fabric is wilting under the effects of rapid modernization.

Mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.

The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams, adjusting the tone, the approach, the narrative twists and the emotional intensity on the fly.

This is the kind of autumnal sentimentality that the Academy goes wild for-a (rightly) venerated performer acknowledging his own mortality by pandering to cheap-seat emotions.

You may often find yourself second-guessing the film, questioning how—and if—it will all come together. But by the time of the intense and impassioned climax, a storm of emotion is ensured: a great movie rising before you like a delusion, like a dream.

It would be kind to call this satire; what it comes off as is a pummeling, testosterone-fueled sensory assault that the film then makes minor variations on for two very long hours.

The kids pick up the filmmakers' lyrical slack more often than not, but this ode to the power of verse could really use a redraft.

More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.

Despite his repentance, you sense that this lost soul will be confessing his sins for all eternity.

You might actually say the documentary itself is Mohassess’s final canvas, so infused it becomes with his alternately infuriating and infectious personality.

What most distinguishes the redo is the often remarkable use of 3-D: Miike turns the format's inherent limitations, especially the tendency toward visual murkiness, to his advantage, fully immersing us in a world suffused with moral and ethical rot.

There's no sense of the oppression France felt under Nazi rule. It's all just play-acting in period-specific attire. You can almost hear the AD calling lunch.

The film builds to a shattering climax that works precisely because all involved fully embrace the melodrama. Be sure to bring Kleenex.

You still leave hoping he ultimately found peace and enlightenment, two things he graciously gave to those of us who hung on his every word.

Even at a mere 75 minutes, Silent Souls is thrillingly dense and allusive, and the elegiac finale maintains the overall air of mystery while beautifully bringing all the disparate threads together.

When The Father of My Children shifts focus to Grégoire’s wife (Caselli) and children (the eldest is beautifully played by De Lencquesaing’s actual daughter, Alice), Hansen-Løve’s hand steadies, and she reveals a true talent for intimate, behavioral observation.

Miners' is tiresome and scattershot.

Despite the best efforts of a cast that mixes unstudied newbies such as The Tree of Life’s Sheridan with Hollywood prima donnas like Reese Witherspoon (a starlet-slumming-it distraction as Mud's dim-bulb inamorata), there’s an overall clunkiness that Nichols is unable to overcome.

A Matrix Reloaded–like cliffhanger reminds that this is only the second installment out of four (good lord), but at least the flick leaves us with more than a tinge of interest in whom the odds will favor next.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

May’s biggest get, however, is Ciavarella himself—a man forever rationalizing his shady actions, who emerges as a more complexly tragic figure than you’d think possible.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.

The Aatsinki siblings never rise past a kind of rotely anonymous masculinity, and overall the film tends to lull rather than engage the senses.

Disney knows how to bewitch a crowd, but the sense that Tangled was made more by corporate mandate than artistic spark remains constant throughout.

One senses this is a production better suited to the stage.

A lesser movie might hammer home the idea that the cult squashes Martha's sense of self. This distinctive and haunting effort implies something much scarier: that there is no self to start with.

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.

The jaw is meant to and does often drop, and not just because of McFarland. Two words: Ja Rule.

It’s nice to see this great filmmaker sculpting something that feels genuinely revelatory. That’s not to say that the 3-D Goodbye to Language is always an easy sit.

Jinn consistently lets down its premise and performers with a by-the-numbers-at-best screenplay that triple-underlines all of its forward-thinking themes.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

As the Sherlock Holmes of the second Zhou Dynasty, Lau is so effortlessly appealing that he manages to anchor the fatigue-heavy proceedings, even when his character has to outrun both the rays of the sun - don't ask - and a collapsing statue while crawling over and under a pack of stampeding horses. Now that's star power.

It’s a reasonably diverting piece of work, falling somewhere between the high of "Magic Mike" (2012) and the low of "Haywire" (2011), among his recent efforts.

The film improves upon reflection, raising, as it does, some knotty questions about originality in art and in life, as well as provocatively positing that even a copy of a copy of a copy has the potential to move hearts and minds.

Maier’s images are truly stunning—vivid documents of the working class that are off-the-cuff yet rigorously composed, always capturing that enigmatic bit of her subject’s soul that leaves you in spine-tingled awe.

Sensation trumps cogitation-unsurprising in a Hollywood production-which doesn't negate the enduring allure of this beautiful bauble.

Heimat certainly has the feel of a summative work

The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.

The story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

Unlike a great Morris film such as "Gates of Heaven" or "Mr. Death," where the quirks of character feel connected to a larger, profoundly insightful vision of humanity, Tabloid never gets beyond its idiosyncratic surface.

Though the tale demands a darker outcome, the director disappointingly goes the Mouse House happy-ending route with a reprise of the original short film's finale - one that somehow plays with even more cringeworthy sentimentality.

Polisse builds to one of the most hilariously misguided climaxes ever conceived; let's just say that this soapy symphony of squalor literally doesn't stick the landing.

What’s past is prescient, and what it all means is beside the point. Let’s just say Bujalski has made a prankishly out-of-time movie about that other AI: mankind.

Director Christian Carion (Merry Christmas) establishes a low-key yet threatening atmosphere right from the start, and gets terrific performances from Kusturica and Canet.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

It never feels as if we're watching a brand-name cash-grab, but instead as if we're participating in an endlessly imaginative afternoon of play.

The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.

The filmmakers do a good job of laying out the whos, whys and wheres through diagrams, reenactments and testimonials from veterans on both sides of the skirmish.

This is not a choice made lightly by anyone involved, but the admirable, multilayered toughness of these sequences is unfortunately weakened by the filmmakers’ saccharine touch whenever they explore the doctors’ personal lives.

[A] very funny, very moving documentary.

There's enough filmmaking talent evident throughout that you wish the journey were more satisfying overall.

This time around, the director documents a 2011 Young solo show in Toronto (the musician's birthplace), but in an intentionally fractured way.

What begins as a tense, inventive suspense film becomes, to paraphrase Doctor Who, a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, mushy-wushy mess. That's decidedly NOT fantastic.