Scott Tobias

Goold, a highly regarded British theater director making his debut feature, lacks the panache to realize this twisted relationship onscreen. Instead he’s made a stolid, well-acted, intelligent drama that respects the complications of Finkel and Longo’s storytelling agendas without bringing them to life.

Sparks has to rely on exterior plot machinations because his characters lack any inner life.

Though Rebels Of The Neon God is missing the austerity and discipline that would make Tsai’s master-shot style so effective—and funny—its relatively conventional approach (including a recurring musical theme!) doesn’t obscure the beautiful, enigmatic tone that’s long set him apart.

Despite some genuinely arresting imagery—urban decay abstracted as poetic horror—the true narrative of Lost River is its bizarre, haphazard search for its own identity.

Clouds Of Sils Maria is a great midlife crisis film, in other words, and, like Irma Vep, it’s also a great meta-commentary on contemporary moviemaking, with Assayas making keen observations about modern celebrity, screen-devouring blockbusters, Internet gossip culture, and the next generation of actresses, represented here by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

It’s a richly imagined drama that gives everyone involved a specific and understandable set of motives for acting the way they do.

With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.

Ned Rifle feels closer to vintage Hartley than anything since 2001’s crazily underrated flop No Such Thing knocked him into semi-obscurity, but its dogged insularity stifles the modest pleasure of hearing the director’s distinct voice and watching his old favorites slip back into familiar roles.

Accepted as fantasy, 5 To 7 has a bright, literate charm that’s hard to resist, thanks to the scattered witticisms in Levin’s script, a deftly managed tone, and fine performances across the cast.

Showing the best of humanity and the worst of humanity doesn’t mean denying one in favor of the other; taken together, Salgado’s photographs have the scope and perspective of someone who can genuinely say he’s seen it all.

With Depardieu’s intensely physical performance at its core, Welcome To New York achieves a level of intimacy that’s rare for films about public figures—and, in this case, exposes Strauss-Kahn for all to see.

Locking into the film’s rhythms requires patience and an abandonment of preconceptions, but it’s nonetheless Alonso’s most accessible work to date, buoyed by spare but lush photography and Viggo Mortensen’s magnetic presence in the lead role. It takes a special kind of charisma to bring viewers along on a journey to nowhere.

Spring’s overall balance suggests that Benson and Moorhead are students of Italian genre cinema and of human behavior; the film has insight and style to burn.

The Zellners are tapping into the allure of movies, that fundamental desire we have to escape our humdrum lives and give ourselves over to the more exciting ones playing out onscreen.

Serena is quite bad, as it happens, but until it goes absolutely haywire in the final act, the biggest problem is that it’s all bones and no flesh, so busy combining all the structural elements that go into an award-winner that it has no personality of its own.

Champs dances around the ring when it should be punching.

Mitchell’s deft handling of the relationships in It Follows gets threaded into an ingenious and exceedingly skillful creepshow.

As Marty continues to run scams, the laughs continue unabated, but the dread only deepens, because we realize he’s a creature of need, capable of anything but empathy. And he’s been pushed to the precipice.

Though Kenner’s slick graphics and attractively photographed talking heads call Errol Morris to mind, his methods are significantly less subtle.

In the end, the film isn’t scary and it isn’t all that brainy, either. It’s just a juicy metaphor in search of worthy action to support it.

Smith and Robbie have great chemistry together, and neither of them try too hard to complicate their fun, sexy partnership.

If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.

“My Life Directed” is mostly disposable, just the sort of home-movie project a restless artist might sketch while stuck in a hotel room for a few months. It’s not a movie so much as a cry for help.

With its genuine interest in the immigrant experience and what it means to be an American, McFarland USA ekes out a victory in the margins, proving that a little openness and a little self-awareness can do wonders.

Much of the observational brilliance of Approaching The Elephant comes from how closely form relates to content: Out of chaos comes order, both at Teddy McArdle and in the film, which brings the personalities and conflicts into sharper focus as it goes along.

Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.

If there’s any thought to the screen musical being revived as more than a Broadway brand extension, Kendrick makes the emphatic case that she’s the star it should be built around.

The film is overstuffed, but it’s swift and unpretentious, barreling through a non-stop series of action setpieces without pausing too long to take a breath. The busyness doesn’t eradicate the clichés, much less enrich the film emotionally or thematically, but there’s no time to think about them when Bodrov and his screenwriters, Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, are moving along to the next sensation. It’s transporting in that sense, and that sense alone.