Kenji Fujishima

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.

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

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

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

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