Mike D'Angelo

Superficiality reigns here. Arguably, that should dominate a movie about a fashion designer. But fashion shows run 10-20 minutes, not two and a half hours.

It’s refreshing to see a prestige costume drama so interested in its heroine that it treats “happily ever after” as an afterthought.

A few dreamy interludes aside, the film’s tone is cool, dispassionate, and matter-of-fact. All that’s missing is a reason to give a damn.

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

The new ending Oelhoffen has dreamed up is unsatisfying—Camus’ version was sharper, nastier, more credible—and the film never strays far from genre convention, but it’s refreshing to see a sincere paean to nobility, honor, and courage, especially one that periodically elevates the pulse with expertly mounted standoffs.

Anyone who’s seen The Miracle Worker in any form will find Marie’s Story very familiar, and even perhaps a bit rote.

Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.

Despite strenuous efforts, 24 Days fails to make the case that Halimi would be alive now had the anti-Semitism of his abductors been properly recognized. And since that’s the film’s sole reason for existence, there’s not much else to say.

It can’t be faulted for its noble intentions. Like many an after-school special, however, it can be faulted in virtually every other department, including stilted performances, turgid dialogue, flat direction, and a general ignorance regarding human nature.

So doggedly ordinary that it constantly teeters on the edge of tedium.

Félix & Meira eventually proves to have more in common with "Fill The Void," and with Burshtein’s effort to depict Orthodox Judaism as more than just a women’s prison, than it had appeared.

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.

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.

Very loosely inspired by Chopra’s 1989 feature "Parinda," this wan crime drama plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate. Everything feels rudimentary and slightly awkward, though it’s possible to discern how the material might once have been powerful.

Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.

Kill Me Three Times is reasonably absorbing while it’s in progress, if only because it succeeds in inspiring curiosity about where it’s headed, but the finale is such a blood-soaked shrugfest that it retroactively makes everything that preceded it feel like a waste of time.

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

It’s a movie to be mildly enjoyed and then left behind — apropos, given the subject matter.

Thompson makes Ruskin such a cardboard villain, playing on stereotypes of the cold, stuffy intellectual, that she turns Gray’s story into a tastefully dreary domestic-prison saga.

Consequently, anyone coming to Ned Rifle cold will be bewildered. But there are numerous pleasures for the initiated, from Ryan’s continuing dissolute mellifluence as Henry Fool to Simon’s rebirth as a terrible stand-up comic constantly monitoring the comments on his blog.

Plympton manages to keep it lively with one stunningly kinetic setpiece after another, many of which could easily be airlifted out of the picture to function as stand-alone shorts.

The film is mostly one long stalling tactic, indulging in unreliable flashbacks and narrative wheel-spinning to expand the details of its tragic scenario to feature-length. When it finally gets to what happened, though, prepare to cringe.

This feels more like porn than any solo feature Clark has ever made, in part because his non-pro cast is unusually wooden even by his standards.

Boys will be boys and wealthy a--holes will be wealthy a--holes in The Riot Club, an alleged cautionary tale that revels in bad behavior for nearly two hours before finally offering up a stern “tsk, tsk, tsk.” Unlike the great gangster and outlaw movies, however, this unpleasant, moralistic film doesn’t succeed in making transgression look cathartically appealing.

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

Part of what made Edgar Wright’s "The World’s End" so refreshing was the way that it feinted at being a certain tired sort of movie before suddenly making a wild leap in another direction. Growing Up And Other Lies, is exactly the mediocre movie that The World’s End was pretending to be.

Marquardt hasn’t thought of a unique take on this predictable scenario, she’s merely done an expert job of disguising it. Still, the first half does function as a impressive showcase for her formal chops, as well as for Bloom’s gorgeously empathetic performance.

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.