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.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

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

Much of the humor in Ripped fails to inspire more than a mild chuckle at best, in part because Epstein’s deliberate pacing sucks the air out of countless scenes.

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.

Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

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.

What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.

Hawkins’ performance in Maudie is as indelible a feat of psychological imagination as it is of physical dedication.

Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.

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

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.

If The Hero works at all, it’s because Elliott brings a measure of emotional truth to even the most sentimental of plot developments, and because Haley exudes such warm patience for his lead actor’s rhythms and cadences.

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.

As impressively exhaustive as it is as a work of history, Dawson City: Frozen Time plays even more affectingly as Morrison’s most direct love letter to cinema: as a tool not only for recording history, but also for capturing between-the-lines truths that history books can only graze.

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

Band Aid never quite adds up to more than the sum of its fleeting charms.

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

Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.

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

The characters here are so vividly drawn and performed, and the contemplative mood so remarkably sustained, that the film casts a genuinely suspenseful and mesmerizing spell over the span of its nearly four hours. Don’t be daunted by its length: at its best, Diaz’s film has the richness of a great, wide-ranging, deeply immersive novel.

Black Butterfly plays as little more than the act of snickering adolescents toying with their audience, complete with an insulting final scene that confirms the film as a total waste of time.

Not only does the film provide an exhaustive account of the band’s rise and fall, but it also clearly articulates their importance in music history, their singular character as a performing entity and even the distinctive nature of their fandom.

It’s sobering enough to witness a dedicated artist facing the possibility of losing his/her ability to create. And yet, Restless Creature is anything but relentlessly downbeat, primarily because Whelan refuses to be cowed by the pressure.

The deeper Tom wades into this psychological morass, the more Danny's volatile behavior seems dictated by the screenwriters' convenience rather than by any plausible depiction of a tortured mind.

Rama Burshtein allows us to form our own impressions based on what she presents to us of the Orthodox faith.

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.

Laura Poitras doesn't indulge in score-settling cheap shots, but seriously grapples with her contradictory subject.

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

The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.

Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman's rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.

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.

The Transfiguration gradually reveals itself to be a coming-of-age tale, one whose central figure reaches a point at which he’s forced to reckon with the evil lurking within himself.

Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.

Intimately focusing on its main character's personal triumphs, its refusing to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.

The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.

Wilson lurches jarringly from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.

Striking throughout are the seemingly caught-on-the-wing moments that subtly enrichen the film’s characterizations.

Deepak Rauniyar may be more skilled dramatist than inspired image-maker, but his admirably balanced and humane social and political perspective is bracing nevertheless.

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

All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.

The Space Between Us is simply disappointing when it isn’t trying to browbeat its audience into emotional submission.

Much of it feels inconsequential compared to his previous films, but McDonagh's unflagging anarchic energy keeps it juicily diverting in the moment.

The film finds no treasure of gleaming originality in its energetically told but crushingly clichéd anti-capitalist parable.

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.

In Sing, musical theater is simply an excuse for the filmmakers to deliver an animated version of American Idol.

The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.

Josh Gordon and Will Speck's Office Christmas Party generally smacks of trying too hard to earn its laughs.

Katie Holmes's feature-length directorical debut is more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.

When he's not busy lamenting a bygone past, Marcello more broadly and usefully reminds us of a world beyond our own and a time beyond the present, all of which can be easy to forget in a country as full of political and economic turmoil as present-day Italy.

Dito Montiel's silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from Shia LaBeouf.

Brendan J. Byrne's documentary about Bobby Sands colors its familiar formal lines with welcome intelligence.

The screenplay's enigmatic nature holds one's interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.

Any initial gestures toward acknowledging Vinny Paz's macho egotism are eventually downplayed as the film becomes just another formulaic triumph-over-adversity saga.

The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.

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.

At times throughout this concert film, Kevin Hart’s brash honesty about himself can feel liberating.

Though the film doesn’t quite overwhelm as horror, the thematic implications are dense enough in this case that it ends up leaving a lingering aftertaste anyway.

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

Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.

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.

Bruce Beresford's film is remarkable for how it manages to indulge so many offensive and shopworn clichés at once.

Transpecos distinguishes itself with a sharp ear for dialogue, keen attention to ground-level detail, and an ending that unexpectedly chooses cautious optimism over blanket cynicism.

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

Any of the film's attempts at moralizing are subsumed by Kevin Smith’s obsession with taking aim at his critics.