Kenji Fujishima

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

Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Though the filmmakers may not believe in a higher power, they still maintain a faith in raunchiness as an id-blasting form of liberation from rigid norms, spiritual, sexual, or otherwise.

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.