Oleg Ivanov

Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s ultimately succumbs to melodramatic clichés and simplistic political demagoguery.

It’s an occasionally amusing and insightful beltway satire that’s ultimately undone by its conventional mise-en-scène and predictable plot.

As the plot mechanically moves through Jesus’s greatest hits, the narrative focuses less and less on Mary Magdalene until her life feels completely beside the point.

So much of the film is given over to highlighting David Hare’s confusion as a tourist in a conflict he can never fully comprehend.

The film is content to present Anton Chekhov's ideas rather than grapple with their provocative and complex subtexts.

In the sly exchanges between the teenage protagonists and their elders, the film reflects a nation's shifting tides.

As seen through James Lord’s eyes, the dramas and passions on display throughout the film come off as melodramas and grotesqueries.

Roland Joffé's film is largely successful in its attempt to grapple with the terrible truths of apartheid and its legacy.

This tentative questioning of the sometimes unscrupulous methods and deleterious consequences of political correctness is further undermined by Ted's insipid character and general indifference to his fate.

It captures the qualities of live theater that are rarely transmitted to film, of being immediate, alive, and spontaneous, as if the viewer is just a stone's throw away from the characters.

Amos Gitai regularly takes incidents and anecdotes out of context, making it difficult for viewers who lack intimate knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to follow the proceedings.

The film fails to seriously address Joseph Beuys voluntarily joining the Hitler Youth and serving with the Luftwaffe.

Throughout the film, a promising character study is smothered beneath lazy genre machinations.

By pairing down Lyndon Baines Johnson’s multifarious life and career to this one piece of legislation, the film fails to do justice to both the man and the fraught times he so fundamentally influenced.

The film is an awkward mix of swashbuckling love story and polemic, painted in very broad strokes.

It too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.

The film seems more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics.

It captures how sports can bring wholly disparate people together to accomplish feats that change the destiny of nations.

Both a potent rendering of and cure for the holiday blues, Bad Santa 2 shows that even the most hopeless situations can be remedied and that just about anyone is capable of redemption

Aisholpan’s liberation is a harbinger of the growing pressure that the outside world exerts on a once isolated community.

The film's attempt at political insight and portrayal of social malaise are meant to give it the illusion of depth.

Throughout his nearly six-hour documentary, Abbas Fahdel is content with showing only the outer surface of people's lives.

Denial shows that people’s misfortunes need not preclude them from living virtuous lives founded on basic human decency.

Pablo Larraín has captured Pablo Neruda in all of his pomposity, pretense, courage, and undeniable genius.

It refuses to pass judgment on whether or not Sergei Polunin's success was worth so much sacrifice and heartache.

The film depicts Edward Snowden's ethical dilemmas in a political vacuum that disregards America's increasingly complex security threats.

Violence in Transpecos is sparse, but the filmmakers use it with a narrative precision that highlights the unforgiving consequences that accompanies every choice in this desolate borderland.

The film comes unsettlingly close to being an apologia for the kind of violence that stems from adolescent disaffection.

The film mostly succeeds in capturing the nuances of an event that continues to arouse passionate debate to this day.

It demonstrates both the fatal proximity and deceptive distance that can exist between the words and deeds of extremists.

It offers a powerful metaphor for the manner in which we carry the memories of our departed inside ourselves.

Director Sean Ellis's film offers a potent examination of the moral rectitude of resistance.

It works as both a modern morality play for our globalized world and as an indictment of Europe's ethical bankruptcy.

It presents a captivating portrait of one of the era's greatest defenders of artistic freedom and a true American original.

It makes a convincing argument for viewing Thomas Wolfe's work as a product of the excess and exuberance of the 1920s.

The film is a seemingly endless series of convoluted double-dealing, backstabbing, and factional realignment.

Eiichi Yamamoto's cult anime strikes a perfect balance between midnight-movie enchantment and arthouse sophistication.

Nothing more than leftwing exploitation cinema, a cheap thriller dressed up in the guise of a social-justice exposé.

The film provocatively has audiences see the world's current ecological concerns in a different and unexpected light.

The film affectively defends food critic Jonathan Gold's assertion that it's ultimately cooking that makes us human.

The filmmakers' perspective is firmly aligned with the views of liberal Zionism, as the leftist peace activists are given the most screen time.

It uses the trappings of the family melodrama to reveal the subtle social constraints that inhibit people, particularly women, from attaining full self-realization.

Theeb insists on the importance of preserving cultural difference against the totalizing vision of racial and religious hegemony.

Victor Frankenstein is the movie version of a carnival sideshow, all smoke and mirrors, presenting a litany of human freaks and animal monstrosities to distract from the superficiality of its psychological and intellectual concerns.

This is activist filmmaking that manages to be both angry and elegiac in its recounting of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.

Ondi Timoner's documentary about Russell Brand basically gives the English comedian turned "activist" a free pass.

It only scratches the surface of the mass psychological wounds and trauma that the trials unleashed on the Germany psyche.

It's best appreciated as a tragicomic profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by the farcical political reality in which he was enmeshed.

It becomes difficult to separate the natives from their communist masters in terms of their treatment of their natural surroundings.

What the film lacks in narrative unity and aesthetic splendor it makes up in moral grandeur and ethical purpose.

It both feeds off of and perpetuates nostalgia for a time when the nation seemed more politically conscious and therefore more capable of creating lasting social change.