Sam C. Mac

It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.

Yourself and Yours‘s commitment to its various extreme ambiguities is a crucial facet of the film’s success.

Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.

Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.

Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.

Stephen Loveridge fully understands that even the trifurcated title of his film may not be entirely equipped at capturing the extent of M.I.A.'s many-faceted identity.

Stark Trek Beyond emphasizes the inter-personal dynamics of the USS Enterprise, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.

Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

Asghar Farhadi falls back on the expository dialogue and dubious perspectival shifts that he frequently resorts to as a means of wrapping up knotty narratives.

It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.

It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.

Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.

Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.

Rogue One is less the fetish object that The Force Awakens is because it at least has the ambitions to create its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coast on existing ones.

Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.

Where The Projectionist ultimately excels ... is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications.

Sleight never shows much interest in exploring how blackness can inform its genre's tropes.

Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis.

Donnie Yen's performance is so good that it's a shame Wilson Yip's films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.

The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.

Michel Hazanavicius co-opts Jean-Luc Godard's personal life for cheap prestige-picture sentiment.

The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.

In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.

The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.

The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.

Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.

The film leaves the lasting impression of a story that takes place in its own elitist and hermetically sealed world.

Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.