Kenji Fujishima

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

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.

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

The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.

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

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

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

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

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 climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.

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.