Kenji Fujishima

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

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.

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.

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

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

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.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.

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

Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.

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

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

If The Hero works at all, it’s because Elliott brings a measure of emotional truth to even the most sentimental of plot developments, and because Haley exudes such warm patience for his lead actor’s rhythms and cadences.

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.

As impressively exhaustive as it is as a work of history, Dawson City: Frozen Time plays even more affectingly as Morrison’s most direct love letter to cinema: as a tool not only for recording history, but also for capturing between-the-lines truths that history books can only graze.

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

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

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

Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.

One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.

The characters here are so vividly drawn and performed, and the contemplative mood so remarkably sustained, that the film casts a genuinely suspenseful and mesmerizing spell over the span of its nearly four hours. Don’t be daunted by its length: at its best, Diaz’s film has the richness of a great, wide-ranging, deeply immersive novel.

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.

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.

It’s sobering enough to witness a dedicated artist facing the possibility of losing his/her ability to create. And yet, Restless Creature is anything but relentlessly downbeat, primarily because Whelan refuses to be cowed by the pressure.

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.

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

Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.

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