Oleg Ivanov

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

A genre mishmash cobbled together from the refuse of disparate visual and narrative modes.