Mike D'Angelo

Hodierne’s intentions were unquestionably good—he spent years researching the short and feature, working with Somali non-pros—but he still managed to fall into the same trap as the other American films on this subject, focusing on individuals rather than group dynamics.

Still, the respectful thing to do, it seems, is to treat An Elephant Sitting Still like any other film, imagining how it would look were Hu already hard at work on his next project. A lot depends on just how much sustained misery one likes to endure.

Unique background elements provide flavor, but apart from the drug of choice here being marijuana rather than cocaine, what unfolds could hardly be less rote.

A film that generously gives Elliott one of the few lead roles of his lengthy career, but mostly asks him to embody clichés, without providing any sense of how he might improve upon them.

24 Exposures is a transparent auto-critique (or self-justification, depending on how you look at it) in the form of a rather vague thriller, and doesn’t work particularly well in either mode.

Suspense can be riveting, but 3 Hearts really needed to deploy its bomb much earlier. When it does goes off, it’s a dud.

There’s a real fascination in watching the gears of this massive machine grind. Once the student protest comes to dominate the film’s second half, however, things get dicier.

Early in The Hot Flashes, Brooke Shields is seen reading Menopause For Dummies, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s precisely what you’re watching.

With a cast this talented...Get A Job is never painful to endure, but neither does it ever rise above lazy mediocrity.

For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.

Pacific Rim never amounts to more than the sum of its setpieces, but it delivers on the promise of its premise.

What starts out as a testament to female fortitude, reminding us that sacrifices were also made on the home front, gradually turns into high-toned soap opera.

Fans of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel will likely be appalled. Those unfamiliar with the cult classic, on the other hand, are more likely to scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering how a yarn with such potential is so suddenly derailed.

Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.

Wasikowska gives a solid, emotionally precise performance, ably supported by the men around her (especially Ifans, who relishes Monsieur Lheureux’s unctuous cajolery), and the result is intelligent and eminently watchable.

Much of what Wiseman captures here is so resolutely ordinary that it threatens to cross the line into outright dull.

There’s no mystery here, no narrator wrestling with the limits of his own generosity and tolerance. Just a lot of stunning scenery and exemplary rectitude.

Apart from its laudable goal of raising awareness, the film doesn’t have much to offer.

It’s a valuable historical document, to be sure; as a movie, however, it’s a dry, grueling experience, lacking Shoah’s monumental grandeur.

No matter how much this story has been streamlined for accessibility’s sake, its import remains potent. In spite of numerous missteps, Pride gets that across.

Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.

For all three hours and change, it’s never less than interesting, but it’s also never much more than interesting.

The movie fails, but it’s like watching R.P. McMurphy try to lift that huge marble fixture in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—at least they tried, goddammit.

Like many historical dramas, unfortunately, this one depicts gripping events without bothering to craft a coherent viewpoint that lends them meaning.

The story’s poignant theme—that love and art retain their beauty even if they can only be indulged once in a lifetime—registers more as an afterthought than as the soul-stirring revelation clearly intended.

Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.

The result is predictably, frustratingly bloated and meandering, even as the short’s charms remain largely intact.

Much of the book’s emotional context appears to have been lost in translation.

The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.

Brun, who had never acted onscreen before (like almost the entire cast), won Berlin’s Best Actress prize, and her guarded yet tremulous performance is the film’s primary virtue. But she can’t singlehandedly bring depth to the superficial scenario that Martinessi has engineered for this intriguing character.

Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire (Johnny Mad Dog) makes some audacious, impressionistic choices, focusing on the nexus of sensual and brutal, but this is the rare true story that really could have used some creative embellishment.

Hittman demonstrates enough talent in It Felt Like Love to suggest that she could make a terrific film. All she needs is an original idea.

What keeps Horses lively is its sharp young cast—especially the two Rachids, who are also brothers in real life, and do an expert job of showing how Hamid and Yachine slowly change places.

Does At Eternity’s Gate have anything new or innovative to share about perhaps the most comprehensively documented painter who’s ever lived? Does the world need another van Gogh biopic? Not really.

It’s good to see Kore-eda try to stretch himself a little, and The Truth demonstrates that his talent can survive on foreign soil. But there’s not as much powerful emotional veracity to it as one might hope.

Happy Valley’s interviews with figures directly related to the case—Paterno’s widow and sons; Sandusky’s adopted stepson, who suddenly declared himself another of Sandusky’s victims toward the end of the trial, after having previously denied having been abused—shed no light on the subject whatsoever, coming across like an obligatory waste of time.

There’s just not enough meat on these bones, and what meat there is has been thoroughly chewed over. Authentic casting doesn’t guarantee anything.

Capernaum brims with compassion for the downtrodden, and that will likely be enough for many viewers (as it clearly was for the Cannes jury). But the film amounts to a series of easy emotional lay-ups, devoid of any psychological nuance or challenging inflection.

An opportunity to see John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan mimic two of early cinema’s most iconic figures, which is this film’s true raison d’être.

Apart from its impressive (though partially digital) recreation of the Sistine Chapel, The Two Popes offers little in the way of purely cinematic pleasures, relying almost exclusively on the expert parrying of Hopkins and Pryce.

Handsome and intelligent, it’s nonetheless a tepid portrait of a relationship that would be unremarkable were the gentleman not Dickens.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

Oklahoma City has little to offer any viewer already familiar with the basics of these three events, each of which gets fairly superficial treatment here.

78/52 is at its best in cinema studies mode, examining specific compositional and editing choices made by Hitchcock and his collaborators.

What’s most frustrating about The Captive is that it includes all the elements for a potentially great Egoyan movie—they’re just buried in the mountain of schlock.

Mostly, though, A Woman’s Life frustrates because it’s neither entertaining nor illuminating to watch a character passively absorb constant misery.

Cantet remains a gifted filmmaker — The Workshop’s semi-improvisational aspects are no less impressive than those in "The Class," and he’s at least superficially engaged with the current state of the world — but this isn’t the return to form that his fans have awaited over the past decade.

After Tiller is an hour and a half of folks on their best behavior, presented as a candid portrait.

The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever.

All the same, as dramatized here, The Attack skirts perilously close to being an apologia for suicide bombing.

There’s no reason whatsoever to watch the entire thing; just skip to the end, which features a series of bone-crunching fight sequences that suggest Lee was just getting warmed up when he left.

There’s such a thing as being too damn ambiguous.

From Afar plays like a typical first feature, with ambition outstripping execution by a hefty margin.

Too blunt and didactic to convey the futility of war with the complexity the subject demands, Tangerines works primarily as a showcase for its trio of lead actors, who work hard to make their characters’ gradual yet quick thaw seem not just credible, but inevitable.

Like Father, Like Son has the overall depth and tenor of a Lifetime movie. Kore-Eda can do much better.

It’s the period itself that’s front and center here — not in the usual sense of historical accuracy, but as a sort of theater of the bizarre that allows Wheatley and his wife, screenwriter Amy Jump, to indulge in dementia.

Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy And Rosie Get Laid) sometimes overdoes the emotional-seesaw routine... But director Roger Michell (who’s previously worked with Kureishi on The Mother, Venus, and the miniseries The Buddha Of Suburbia) maintains a slightly jagged rhythm that proves disarming, and he has two magnificent collaborators in Broadbent and Duncan.

Given the wealth of possibilities, this doc’s superficial, exceedingly polite approach is a big disappointment.

Unlike a lot of other advocacy docs—films that seek to raise awareness regarding some serious issue, often concluding with a call to action—Netflix’s The Ivory Game offers something spectacularly visual: elephants.

Little Feet barely even qualifies as slight. It’s more of a limbering exercise for its director than a full-fledged project, and it’s overly reliant on his offspring’s minor charms.

Rage actually has something to say about the futility of vengeance, though that doesn’t become apparent until a climactic revelation re-contextualizes everything. Unfortunately, getting to that sorrowful ending is a real slog.

Caranfil, who’s made several previous features in Romanian, struggles throughout to find the right tone, mostly in vain. There’s no way to know whether he was hampered by the need to go international, but the film’s general lack of authenticity certainly doesn’t do it any favors.

The whole movie is encased in air quotes, and its sole purpose, apart from that winking, is to argue that even artsy-fartsy grumps secretly identify with Hollywood wish-fulfillment. Would Guerschuny the film critic have liked The Film Critic? If so, he’s a soft touch.

Dark Waters would likely have been a forgettable mediocrity in anybody’s hands, given its fact-based, muckraking limitations. Coming from the visionary who gave us Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, and Carol, it’s a crushing disappointment.

Visually, nothing’s changed, with Auteuil still framing his actors (and himself) in purely functional medium shots, occasionally punctuated by postcard-pretty views of Marseilles’ piers. Dramatically, however, Fanny is a bit meatier.

The film is less effective as an inspirational saga than as a simple portrait of a marriage in its twilight years, with the house-in-progress serving as a metaphor for love that endures by being constantly renewed.

The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since?

A few excerpts of Leduc’s prose spoken in voiceover, expressing the same feelings poetically, can’t compensate for over two hours of maudlin self-pity. It’s so annoying that dull shots of Leduc writing serve as a welcome respite.

It does put a human face on the suffering of those who lost jobs and/or loved ones, which has some value, but anyone hoping for a more nuanced take than “corporations are bad and regular folks are good” will be disappointed.

It’s too bad that the movie shifts from having too little juice to having too much, because there are hints of a more compelling middle ground.

Without Wong Kar-Wai’s visual grandeur to provide a sense of the epic, The Final Master just lurches clumsily from one scene to the next, flatlining whenever fists aren’t flying.

A lazy shoulder shrug of a movie that never bothers to work out who its characters are, what they want, or why their ostensible problems should be of interest to anyone else.

Mumford and O’Leary struggle to make sense of their characters, but are stymied by a script that regards them primarily as mouthpieces for talking points that, again, aren’t even the points anyone’s using when talking about drone warfare.

War is hell, in other words, and punishing these soldiers—and Winfield in particular—for doing what they were taught to do is wrong.

Like most mediocre documentaries these days, Fed Up alternates between regurgitated facts (often presented in snazzy animated interludes), talking-head interviews, and a “human angle” involving a few regular folks who are struggling with the problem in question.

It’s bracing to see Basinger take on something this dark, even if the darkness is empty.

Ultimately, the search here isn’t so much for Bergman as it is for a thesis and conclusion. Those who know nothing about the subject will learn a little. Those who know a lot will learn very little.

We’re talking maximum sound and fury, and while no movie that stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard could signify nothing, this one doesn’t signify a whole lot.

Whether it’s possible to go on loving somebody who’s no longer himself is a momentous question that this movie largely ducks, ultimately providing an answer that seems imposed from without rather than arrived at organically.

It’s a compelling story. Trouble is, it isn’t a terribly visual story, and this documentary doesn’t serve it nearly as well as a book or lengthy article would.

Eventually, Preparations has to stop preparing and deliver some sort of answer to its central mystery, even if that turns out to be one of those maddening or exhilarating (according to taste and/or how skillfully it’s handled) shoulder shrugs. Sadly, the reveal here is quite banal, which retroactively makes the film as a whole play like a prolonged, unsatisfying tease.

The inherent risk of this vérité approach is that your subject won’t prove to be all that fascinating, and The Brink, while far more openly critical of Bannon than "American Dharma," ultimately offers little justification for spending an hour and a half in his company.

It’s a film of nearly pure sensation: woozy, intoxicating, visually gorgeous… and maddeningly repetitive.

One hires Cage for a generic timewaster like this in the hope that he’ll make it at least a little more interesting on screen than it was on paper, by virtue of some crazed facial expressions and off-the-wall line readings, but he evidently wasn’t in the experimenting mood.

Where You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet added layers of meta-reflection to plays (by Jean Anouilh) that are terrific in their own right, Life Of Riley struggles in vain to find cinematic value in one of Alan Ayckbourn’s lesser efforts.

Nobody involved ever came up with an idea or character remotely worth exploring, yet they all forged ahead anyway, placing their faith in the filmmaking process itself, and this damp squib of an ostensible movie is the decidedly lackluster result.

The characters inhabiting this convoluted, tough-to-follow story feel too much like chess pieces, despite the refreshing multi-ethnic cast.

Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow.

With so much talent involved, there are inevitably some amusing moments, which keep tedium at least partly at bay.

Alas, while modern technology allows for impressive, convincing effects work on a comparatively tiny budget, the basic concept itself hasn’t improved with age. Clever ideas are still in short supply.

Smiling Faces is a strongly promising first effort, introducing a talented filmmaker who’s still in the process of finding his own voice. Still, don’t be too surprised if, three or four features down the road, it retroactively looks much more singular.

Mozhdah, appearing in her first film, can’t match the astonishing, bone-deep understanding of psychic masochism and involuntary complicity that Nicole Kidman brought to her similarly fraught therapy sessions in "Big Little Lies" — this film isn’t operating on that rarefied level in any respect, frankly — but she does manage, in this quietly harrowing scene, to make Nisha more than just a helpless victim.

When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy, and it really does play, for better and worse, like a lengthy exploration of that Shins song’s thesis.

Because little happens story-wise, Cannibal necessarily functions as a character study, but one that’s frustratingly short on character.

Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality.

The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.

The film struggles in vain to balance petty infidelities and other personal crises with displacement, famine, and death.

What primarily comes across is a film about squandered creativity that itself ignores and trivializes the creative process, pretending that child prodigies produce masterworks unconsciously, like a chicken laying eggs. That’s a poor lesson to impart.