Kenji Fujishima

Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.

While its desire to question absolutes is admirable, there’s a hollowness at the film’s core that prevents it from having a more pointed impact beyond surface provocation.

Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.

The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.

RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.

Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.

Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.

With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.

Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.

In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.

The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.

For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.

Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.

Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.

The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.

As stimulating as it is, the animation ends up being more pictorial than expressive—an initially fancy but eventually rather monotonous way to dress up what is ultimately a mundane drag of a detective procedural.

By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.

The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.