Steve Macfarlane

Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.

Jurassic World can't tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.

This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.

It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.

The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.

As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.

Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.

The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.

The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.

Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.

Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.

The filmmakers delve into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses--as shrug-worthy a stab at picturing the contemporary black market as could be requested.

What will make the film essential for future generations isn't mere flashpoint topicality, but the way it aligns an old struggle with a current one.

The film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play's hidebound, soul-baring pleasures mesmerizing on screen, and without copping to reductivism.

Costa's storytelling is illusory at best, but Horse Money's self-contradictions are communicated not via plot half as much as in scenography, even in the costuming.

It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.

The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.

It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.

To Keira Knightley's credit, she's all too willing to undercut her pretty-girl reputation by looking and acting a fool for Lynn Shelton's camera.

Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.

By putting so much weight on his characters' speech, Alex Ross Perry's is an approach with honestly few contemporaries in American independent film.

Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.

While the trivia value may feel tremendous, only One9's interviews with Nas, his father, Olu Dara, and his brother, Jungle, manage to make the doc legitimately moving--a history lesson in popular culture.

Opting for scenes that tend to be fragmented, flawed snippets from a much bigger story, the film exudes a bizarre confidence in not trying to encapsulate the singer's whole life in 120 minutes.

Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.

It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.

For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.

Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.