Sam C. Mac

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

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.

The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.

Call Me by Your Name is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story that's at its finest in moments when the relationships take on larger meanings than their literal context implies, and Luca Guadagnino finds evocative aesthetic expressions for them.

Yance Ford’s film builds into an emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically complex work of essay and memoir.

An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.

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

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

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

It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.

Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.

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.

The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.

Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.

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

It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.

What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.

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

Cameraperson is certainly a collection of memorable images, but it's more so Johnson's facility with narrative, on a micro and macro level, that impresses.

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.

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

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.

Jon Favreau draws heavily on his film's animated predecessor for plot, characterizations, and more, but doesn't know how to fit these familiar elements into his own coherent vision.

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

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.

It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.

It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.