Kenji Fujishima

Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.

While its desire to question absolutes is admirable, there’s a hollowness at the film’s core that prevents it from having a more pointed impact beyond surface provocation.

Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.

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.

RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.

Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.

Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.

With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.

Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.

In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.

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

For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.

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

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

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

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.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.

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.

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.

By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.

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

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.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

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.

Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith's film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.

The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.

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.

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

Though the film doesn’t quite overwhelm as horror, the thematic implications are dense enough in this case that it ends up leaving a lingering aftertaste anyway.

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.

All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.

There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.

All the narrative hopscotching is little more than a superficial ploy to gussy up a clichéd redemption tale.

This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.

Hong’s two-part structure in Right Now, Wrong Then, instead of just being a cute formal trick, reveals a character’s troubled inner life in fiendishly clever ways.

The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.

It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.

The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.

It's hardly a desecration of Pascal Laugier's 2008 French horror film of the same name, but that assumes the original is a canonical text.

A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.

If the film is any indication, Jared and Jerusha Hess remain committed to clotting up the screen with ostensibly charming "eccentricity."

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.

All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.

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.

Failure hovers over the film as much as it did in Schulz's comic strip, infusing even its most ebullient set pieces and designs with a sense of melancholy.

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

Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.

It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.

Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.

As informative and passionate as he often is on screen, Michael Moore also always toes the line toward shooting himself in the rhetorical foot with his own thuggish persona.

The effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.

The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.

Worse than offering no especially fresh angles on its cliched material, however, are the trite characterizations of the two lead female characters.

The titular Transporter is now but a blank slate serving the characters and mayhem surrounding him, a walking metaphor for a franchise that's run out of gas.

If first-timer Aleksander Bach's choices as a director are any indication, he's a filmmaker who cares less about characters and actors than about dubious surface dazzle.

Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.

Jorge Michel Grau's ambitions are stalled by a screenplay that seems to have never made it past a first draft.

Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.

Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.

Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.

It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.

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

Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.

The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.

If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.

Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.

Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.

Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.

The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.

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

Instead of finding one consistent tone and sticking to it, Serge Bozon allows the wildly hilarious and the grimly serious to uneasily coexist, exulting in the resultant clash.

Here is a film that isn't afraid to risk didacticism in order to put across its vision of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of colonialism.

One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.

Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.

This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.

There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.

Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.

Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.

It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.

Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.

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.

To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.

Less explored in all the ensuing back-patting is the question of whether Cameron is, in fact, sincerely interested in learning more about the world around him or whether this mission is merely intended to stroke his own ego.

Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.

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

A glorified act of hero worship that leaves one hard-pressed to form any conclusion other than an infinitely positive one about Shep Gordon.

As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.

The question of why one should actually work up any emotional investment in what happens to these people is never really answered, much less asked in the first place.

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.

Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.

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.

With its broad performances, rapid-fire pacing, and rampant visual and verbal gags, Bernard Tavernier's first out-and-out comedy doesn't try too hard to hide its graphic-novel origins.

Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.

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.

Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.

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

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

Given its virtuous subject matter and the relative bloodlessness of its violence, perhaps Renny Harlin means for this film to be a means of atoning for his previous cinematic sins.

This botched vision accepts the warrior's nobility at face value and sees the story merely as a springboard for high-flying action and CGI special effects.

For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.

Mark Mori goes a bit overboard in hammering home his appreciation of Bettie Page's significance, allowing the film to occasionally lapse into repetitiveness.

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.

It’s a stylistic throwback as well: an old-fashioned, star-studded, big-budget historical epic with an intermission, filmed in a classical style that hearkens back in some ways to David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

A film full of fascinating contradictions.