Matt Zoller Seitz

Bianca Stigter's documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a great film about filmmaking and a quietly devastating memorial for lives long gone.

Everyone in this cast does their best to strike the right balance between seeming in on the joke and acting like all of this bloody absurdity is normal.

Bullet Train is at its best when it's a comedy about self-styled badasses who think they're free agents but are really all just passengers on a train rocketing from one station to another, oblivious to the desires of any individual riding on it. The abstractness and "it's all a lark" humor ultimately undo any aspect that might otherwise sink its roots into the viewer's mind.

A jumbled, fitfully amusing, occasionally fascinating effort, but one that shows promise even when it's stumbling over its ambition and falling prey to some of the same stereotypes about "red" and "blue" (or reactionary and progressive) America that it keeps intimating that Americans need to get beyond.

It's torment in cinematic form, made comprehensible and engrossing by its focus on a singular experience, and the performance that anchors it.

Fire of Love is one of a vanishingly rare breed of documentary that is determined to be "total cinema," not just capturing the facts of what happened to its subjects but creating an entire aesthetic—a vibe—around them.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

First Love is an earnest but unremarkable romance wrapped around an intelligent and sometimes powerful story of the destruction that capitalism inflicts on middle-class American families.

The film's main goal is to make us laugh and pull the rug out out from under us. But while there's a bit of pathos here and there, the movie doesn't add up to much in the end.

Ninety minutes of footage like this, minus any characters or plot at all, probably would've resulted in an artistically better use of a couple hundred million dollars than "Jurassic World: Dominion," which will doubtless be a smash on the order of all the other entries in the franchise, even though it doesn't do much more than the bare minimum you'd expect for one of these films, and not all that well.

By the time the film eases into its final stretch, it becomes a sub-genre of drama that I call "accidental radio," meaning that even though there are pictures, you might not see them all because you're covering your eyes a lot of the time.

Part of the film's specialness lies in the fact that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the choices it makes, or when it decides to make them.

This is a dazzling movie, all the more so for being made on a seemingly tiny budget. Emergency has a lot to say even though it never carries itself as a film that has a message.

There are many rewards to be found here, not the least of which is a skill at staging scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends that are entirely dependent upon the subtle interactions of a few actors who live or die on the basis of the words they've been given to speak, and the silences they've been encouraged to inhabit.

Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.

Like its lead character, and the actor who plays him, Barry Levinson's The Survivor initially presents as familiar and comprehensible. The biographical drama then proceeds to surprise its audience, not with plot twists—we're told at the outset what the character's issues are, and have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up—but with how it keeps finding little ways to complicate and deepen every relationship and moment.

A film like Linklater's brings you inside the consciousness of a person whose perceptions of the world are simultaneously constrained and curious, and open to new experiences.

If this movie and her previous project signal a shift in Watts' career that will be dominated by survival tales that put her at the center of a movie and showcase her doing things that give most viewers a pulled tendon just sitting there in the audience, so much the better.

Ahed's Knee is a fascinating movie that evades most complaints of not having anything to say by showcasing its characters struggling to explain free-floating anxieties that have to do with a lot of things. It's also stylish as hell.

It's one of [Rogowski's] most moving and fully imagined performances, anchoring a drama that tries to do a bit too much for its own good in terms of structure.

Once in a while, you see a film where it's clear that everyone involved is operating at the peak of of their skills, yet the whole is so misguided that the result is still awful. Such is The Desperate Hour.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

A tougher, smarter film than American sci-fi cinema buffs are used to seeing.

It is equal parts Buster Keaton-Jackie Chan slapstick extravaganza, WWE-styled spectacle, and "geek trick."

Is it a compliment or a slam to say that "Sundown" could be the saddest "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode ever?

The Last Thing Mary Saw is so effective as a vehicle for performances, atmosphere, and period detail, and so convincing an examination of suffering under the boot-heel of a cult, that one may wish that it added up to more.

Unfortunately, the craftsmanship is lacking.