Matt Brennan

López’s film smuggles queer ideas and images into spaces traditionally populated by straight people and shaped by straight tastes. Which is, to be clear, no more the “right” way of updating the genre for the 21st century than any other. It’s just nice, for a change, to come in through the front door.

Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.

It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.

Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.

The film is a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.

The film's understanding of the brittleness that begets the "traditions" of frat culture is altogether shallow.

Jeff Feuerzeig isn't skeptical enough of Laura Albert's explanations and rationalizations.

It recombines elements of the emigrant saga and the coming-of-age story into a searching, fresh-faced portrait.

Director Ira Sachs transforms the smallest blip on life's radar, a childhood friendship, into a momentous occasion.

There's no sustained effort to answer the first question any editor or J-school instructor worth his or her salt would ask: So what?

The film's clichés ultimately contain both too little conviction and too little complication, their inspirational messages more imagined than real.

A charged, unnerving turn of the screw, The Invitation is consumed by the fear of forgetting.

Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.

It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichés that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.

It's the summative effect of the story's modest exchanges, unspooling one after another in long, tranquil shots, that lends the film its profound sense of loss.

Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man's perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.

The film simply mucks up its earnest take on the buddy movie with undercooked characters and on-the-nose writing.

In straining for the profound, the film ultimately loses its way in a veritable no-man's land of ill-conceived stylistic choices and narrative switchbacks.

The film evades all but the most careful commonplaces about the relationship between the viewer and the work of art at its center.

It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.