Kenji Fujishima

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Waxwork is certainly no hidden horror gem, but its flashes of wit and genuine enthusiasm for the horror genre are enough to make it a reasonably enjoyable time.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

[An] unintentionally hilarious tragic romance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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