Kenji Fujishima

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.

The deeper Some Freaks wades into what becomes a series of sadistic and masochistic humiliations, the more McDonald’s film begins to feel schematic, with these characters little more than pawns in a screenwriter’s game of toying with our expectations.

Brigsby Bear is so committed to its brand of self-congratulatory uplift that the filmmakers refuse to contemplate any of their material’s darker aspects.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

To some degree, Rough Night's attention to character detail compensates for its weaknesses as a comedy.

Paisley and McGuinness's intellectual back and forth is rendered so compellingly that one wishes the filmmakers didn’t feel a need to resort to a surfeit of momentum-killing plot contrivances.

Wakefield is… well, let’s just say, its insights into human nature are limited, at best.

Past Life does add up to more than the sum of its heavy-handed miscalculations.

One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.

Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.

Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith's film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.

If Fluk’s film has any impact at all, much of it is thanks to Dan Stevens, who brings an empathy to James that occasionally complicates the director/co-writer’s two-dimensional view of the character.

Junction 48 mostly sticks to uplifting formula, rarely offering anything particularly fresh or interesting.

Fraud adds up to little more than a formally provocative but thematically tired stunt.

Some of the biking footage is pretty in a generic way; for the most part, we're told rather than shown how astonishing the riders' athletic feats are. More off-putting is the film's reflexive canonization of its subject.

It’s all window-dressing for an ending that reveals this alternately goofy and self-serious big-budget Hollywood product to be little more than a two-hour prelude to a potential future franchise.

The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.

It aims for John Waters-style transgression without evincing half of Waters’s wit and affection for eccentric lifestyles.

Haimes seems less interested in examining this unfamiliar world and the people involved than in shoving them into feel-good platitudes about following your dreams.

Take away Forster’s hard-working visual style, and what All I See Is You essentially presents is a standard relationship drama, with two generic, privileged people at its heart who don’t become any more striking even as the tensions between the two gradually reach a breaking point.

The film's makers lose trust in the intellectual heft of their material and chose to prioritize empty sensation instead.

Slight though it may be, Lace Crater's mix of Andrew Bujalski–style naturalism and Roman Polanski–style body horror is at least off-kilter enough to keep one absorbed throughout.

The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.

Our Little Sister often vibrates with such tenderness of feeling that it’s difficult to dismiss outright. The excellent performances from the four lead actresses help offset the occasional heavy-handedness of the script, with Kore-eda alive to their distinctive tics and gestures.

Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.

The even-handedness of Yu's gaze throughout the first part of the film, alas, isn't sustained in the second and third chapters.

Hanks brings to Clay a nervous energy, a sense of desperation to even his most outwardly optimistic of gestures, that nevertheless always seems tempered by a more sober inner awareness of his own failures. It’s a remarkable performance in a film that is unworthy of it.

All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.

There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.

It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.

It's hardly a desecration of Pascal Laugier's 2008 French horror film of the same name, but that assumes the original is a canonical text.

A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.

All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.

Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.

As informative and passionate as he often is on screen, Michael Moore also always toes the line toward shooting himself in the rhetorical foot with his own thuggish persona.

Worse than offering no especially fresh angles on its cliched material, however, are the trite characterizations of the two lead female characters.

Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.

Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.

Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.

There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.

Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.

An immensely gifted physical performer, Donnie Yen isn't strong enough an actor to suggest an authentic inner life to his character beyond a vague sense of stone-faced dissatisfaction.

As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.

Adds up little more than an anguished man using the hook of following his famous brother in order to gaze, however critically, at his reflection for 75 minutes.