Kenji Fujishima

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

If Fluk’s film has any impact at all, much of it is thanks to Dan Stevens, who brings an empathy to James that occasionally complicates the director/co-writer’s two-dimensional view of the character.

The Transfiguration gradually reveals itself to be a coming-of-age tale, one whose central figure reaches a point at which he’s forced to reckon with the evil lurking within himself.

Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.

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

The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.

Wilson lurches jarringly from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.

Striking throughout are the seemingly caught-on-the-wing moments that subtly enrichen the film’s characterizations.

Deepak Rauniyar may be more skilled dramatist than inspired image-maker, but his admirably balanced and humane social and political perspective is bracing nevertheless.

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

All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.

The Space Between Us is simply disappointing when it isn’t trying to browbeat its audience into emotional submission.

Much of it feels inconsequential compared to his previous films, but McDonagh's unflagging anarchic energy keeps it juicily diverting in the moment.

The film finds no treasure of gleaming originality in its energetically told but crushingly clichéd anti-capitalist parable.

Fraud adds up to little more than a formally provocative but thematically tired stunt.

Some of the biking footage is pretty in a generic way; for the most part, we're told rather than shown how astonishing the riders' athletic feats are. More off-putting is the film's reflexive canonization of its subject.

It’s all window-dressing for an ending that reveals this alternately goofy and self-serious big-budget Hollywood product to be little more than a two-hour prelude to a potential future franchise.

In Sing, musical theater is simply an excuse for the filmmakers to deliver an animated version of American Idol.

The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.

Josh Gordon and Will Speck's Office Christmas Party generally smacks of trying too hard to earn its laughs.

Katie Holmes's feature-length directorical debut is more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.

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.

Dito Montiel's silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from Shia LaBeouf.

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

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

Any initial gestures toward acknowledging Vinny Paz's macho egotism are eventually downplayed as the film becomes just another formulaic triumph-over-adversity saga.

The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.

The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.