Kenji Fujishima

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

Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.

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.

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.