Mike D'Angelo

Duplass and Paulson counteract the deliberately banal dialogue (Duplass also wrote the screenplay) with superbly anxious body language; Jim and Amanda’s “casual,” “amiable” chitchat is so painfully forced that it’s a wonder nothing ruptures.

If Garrel’s recent films (which also include In The Shadow Of Women and Frontier Of Dawn) play like variations on a theme, this one at least varies more than usual.

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.

Unfortunately, while there’s enough fascinating material here for an hour-long documentary, this one runs two hours, with most of the present-day talking-head footage (interspersed throughout, to momentum-halting effect) feeling irrelevant.

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

Rather than aim for uproarious, it constantly settles for amusing.

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

If the film fails to deliver wonders, it does offer substantial pleasures.

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.

There’s a wishy-washiness to the film’s ideological bent that keeps steering things in a more conventional direction, as if Jones (or perhaps Glendon Swarthout, who wrote the source novel) were afraid to take this risky material all the way. It’s a decidedly bumpy ride to an odd destination.

There’s a difference between an exhibition of one photographer’s work and a speedy tour of a museum’s entire photography wing, and Watermark feels more like the latter, despite Burtynsky’s involvement.

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.

The movie isn’t afraid to go to some dark places.

Because the actors are uniformly strong, though, and because the neighborhood itself provides such a credible context, Slattery manages to create the impression of an immense backstory that informs every interaction, making any sketchiness seem like naturalism rather than a failure of imagination.

It’s a magnificently acrid showcase for two idiosyncratic actors who seem uncannily in tune with each other, even as their characters are out of sync.

It’s at once ridiculous and genuinely inspiring—Robert Altman in a nutshell.

As a sequel, Queen & Country doesn’t work at all, primarily because Boorman waited far too long.

Ultimately, you’re looking at four men struggling to explain an act of post-adolescent stupidity, accompanied by elaborate moving illustrations. It’s moderately entertaining, but the calories feel empty.

Everybody Knows never quite makes the leap from engrossing to exciting. Even the story’s one big plot twist is obvious enough that many will guess it well in advance, and it doesn’t reverberate backward the way that long-buried secrets usually do in Farhadi’s work.

The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.

Viewers will be torn between admiring its laid-back naturalism and wishing it possessed just a little more oomph.

Characters are occasionally in physical danger (a young Charles Bronson, still billed as Charles Buchinsky, plays Jarrod’s mute muscle), but true horror derives from the juxtaposition of composed behavior and obscene acts. No one delivered that combination better than Vincent Price.

Chow’s go-for-broke sensibility has been sorely missed, and a tale of demons is the ideal context for the gravity-defying, logic-impaired stunts he favors.

Superficially similar to Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated Omar, it’s a considerably more complex and nuanced examination of the conflicted loyalties and dangerous relationships that characterize daily life in the Middle East, featuring remarkably strong, charismatic performances by a host of mostly non-professional actors.

Ultimately, despite Kikuchi’s expressively dour performance and David Zellner’s formal invention... Kumiko feels like a collection of amusing and/or depressing riffs stitched together within a context that barely matters.

It’s arguable that the jocks and cheerleaders are this movie’s true heroes, without whom those pathetic dorks would never be able to find one another.

Ghost Stories works best as an exercise in nostalgia. Those seeking hardcore, modern-day scares will be disappointed.