Kenji Fujishima

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.