Kenji Fujishima

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.

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

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

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

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.

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

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

Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.

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.

Hlynur Pálmason, who has a background in visual art, explores the film’s family dynamics through a vignette-like structure that sometimes feels akin to walking through an art exhibition.

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

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

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.

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.

Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.

The film may not announce itself as hagiography, but it’s hero-worshipful to its core.