Pat Brown

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.

Rachel Lears’s film is a rebuttal to the position that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election victory was an incidental event in American politics.

Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.

Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.

The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.

The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.

With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.

Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.

The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.

The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.

It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.

The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.

Ana Brun’s performance as Chela anchors our attention where Marcelo Martinessi’s understated visuals might otherwise lose it.

Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.

Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.

Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.

When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.

As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.

The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.

Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.

By uniting these four interviews in particular, Claude Lanzmann emphasizes the impossibility of moral clarity in the unthinkable circumstances into which Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe threw its Jewish population.