Melissa Anderson

What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.

As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.

Greenspan and Harmon's paltry song of themselves concludes with five minutes of outtakes, capping the self-love.

For a movement that was "fundamentally leaderless," Braderman's film gives its participants an opportunity to rightfully claim: "We thought we could change things--and, in fact, we did."

The force of the acting alone almost compensates for some of the more difficult (and realistic) questions about not giving birth that García willfully sidesteps.

As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.

Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.

Her (Davis) homage--tender, never hagiographic--also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that the artist was up against.

I can’t recall ever squirming as much as I did during Ronnie and Will’s first kiss; shiny, buff Hemsworth looks like he’s locking lips with an Andy Hardy–era Mickey Rooney in a wig.

Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.

The biggest surprise here is Tatum, whose butch reticence has never been put to better use: His saddest farewell isn’t to his lady, but to a man even more uncommunicative than he is.

This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."

There's great archival footage.

If Markell's instincts for script exhumation are questionable, she's the victim of even worse timing: Who thought releasing her film 10 days after Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's praised-to-the-high-heavens "A Streetcar Named Desire" closed was a good idea?

Gessner’s film may be for Foster completists only. But the intensity of her dead-eyed stare as the final credits scroll across her face reminds us of her preternatural ability, as a kid and beyond, to transform even the most negligible movie or scene into an event.

Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.

Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.

A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.

Misery pile-up.

Dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait that you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent.

Guggenheim's insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious-that "past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers"-seem all the more willfully naïve.

Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs.

Spread becomes a sloggy, tepid comeuppance tale.

The Coco of Fontaine's project--which she co-wrote with her sister, Camille, freely adapting Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irrégulière: ou, Mon itinéraire Chanel--can be described as courtesan before couturiere.

When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.

Wintour's arctic imperiousness has a way of creating the most masochistic deference, a dynamic that R.J Cutler superficially explores--and becomes prone to--in his documentary The September Issue.

A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.

There's trouble in Paradis-and in a script that prizes frenzy over any actual feeling.