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.

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

The film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.

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 film's messy pile-up of comic diversions can be exhilarating in the moment—the chaos of an id given free rein.

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.

While the film aims for humane evenhandedness, recognizing both Farnez's lower-class condescension and the revolutionaries' hypocrisy, the characters are so skin-deep that we never respond to them as people.

This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.

It resonates as a portrait of artists trying to figure out their own paths toward making valuable contributions to the world.

The film's lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.

[An] unintentionally hilarious tragic romance.

Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.

Tragic anecdotes put a human face on this still-polarizing issue and serve Soechtig and Couric’s broad argument in Under The Gun better than any heavy-handed music cues and animated statistics ever could.

It's never made clear how witnessing a family deal with their specific issues affects Jesus's own perspective on his destiny.

Instead of the clinical detachment implied by the title Those People, writer-director Joey Kuhn bathes his first feature in warm compassion.

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.

Even more than in Paris, Je T'Aime and New York, I Love You, this latest omnibus in producer Emmanuel Benbihy's "Cities of Love" franchise might leave viewers wondering whether these needed to be set in Rio de Janeiro at all.

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.

All the narrative hopscotching is little more than a superficial ploy to gussy up a clichéd redemption tale.

This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.

Hong’s two-part structure in Right Now, Wrong Then, instead of just being a cute formal trick, reveals a character’s troubled inner life in fiendishly clever ways.

The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.

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

The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.

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.

If the film is any indication, Jared and Jerusha Hess remain committed to clotting up the screen with ostensibly charming "eccentricity."

Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.

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.

Failure hovers over the film as much as it did in Schulz's comic strip, infusing even its most ebullient set pieces and designs with a sense of melancholy.

It has enough ingredients for a reasonably entertaining fantasy adventure—except, that is, for an interesting lead character with an emotionally compelling hook.

Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.

It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.

Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.

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 effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.

The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.

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

The titular Transporter is now but a blank slate serving the characters and mayhem surrounding him, a walking metaphor for a franchise that's run out of gas.

If first-timer Aleksander Bach's choices as a director are any indication, he's a filmmaker who cares less about characters and actors than about dubious surface dazzle.

Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.

Jorge Michel Grau's ambitions are stalled by a screenplay that seems to have never made it past a first draft.

Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.

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

Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.

It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.

It weaves through past and present, memories and reality, analysis and history, like a mercurial mind reminiscing seemingly at random.

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.

The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.

If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.

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

Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.

Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.

The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.

Director Ian Cheney doesn't delve too deeply into the possibly unsettling questions the documentary raises about society at large.

Instead of finding one consistent tone and sticking to it, Serge Bozon allows the wildly hilarious and the grimly serious to uneasily coexist, exulting in the resultant clash.

Here is a film that isn't afraid to risk didacticism in order to put across its vision of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of colonialism.

One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.

Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.

This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.

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.

Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.

It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.

Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.

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.

To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.

Less explored in all the ensuing back-patting is the question of whether Cameron is, in fact, sincerely interested in learning more about the world around him or whether this mission is merely intended to stroke his own ego.

Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.

The familiar premise is done with enough intelligence and heartfelt conviction that it rises above its potentially cliché trappings.

A glorified act of hero worship that leaves one hard-pressed to form any conclusion other than an infinitely positive one about Shep Gordon.

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.

The question of why one should actually work up any emotional investment in what happens to these people is never really answered, much less asked in the first place.

By keeping explanatory talking-heads interviews to a minimum, the filmmakers put their trust in the audience to draw their own conclusions based on what they present to us.

Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.

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.

With its broad performances, rapid-fire pacing, and rampant visual and verbal gags, Bernard Tavernier's first out-and-out comedy doesn't try too hard to hide its graphic-novel origins.

Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.

Stephen Chow's distinctive vision is evident in the seemingly boundless imagination of his scenarios, and in the film's sincere spiritual concerns and generosity toward misfits and outsiders.

Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.

It constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality.

A coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through its subject's first-person perspective.

Given its virtuous subject matter and the relative bloodlessness of its violence, perhaps Renny Harlin means for this film to be a means of atoning for his previous cinematic sins.

This botched vision accepts the warrior's nobility at face value and sees the story merely as a springboard for high-flying action and CGI special effects.

For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.

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

The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.

It’s a stylistic throwback as well: an old-fashioned, star-studded, big-budget historical epic with an intermission, filmed in a classical style that hearkens back in some ways to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

A film full of fascinating contradictions.