Kenji Fujishima

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Mark Mori goes a bit overboard in hammering home his appreciation of Bettie Page's significance, allowing the film to occasionally lapse into repetitiveness.

There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.

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.

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.