Steve Macfarlane

The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.

Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.

It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.

A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.

With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.

Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.

It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.

A shrill Indiewood torture porn that, despite promised shocks and revulsions, doesn't even have the conviction to hold its camera on the story's most appalling twists.

The filmmakers spend vastly more time chronicling bigoted remarks from Romanians about gypsy life than they do actual gypsy life, so a minor crisis of perspective hangs over Our School.

The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.

Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.

A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.

The chop-socky wire-fu scenes are beautifully choreographed, but pretty crudely edited; despite its gourmet neo-grindhouse trappings, the film won't bring the heat like you've never seen before.

It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.

Essentially a live-action anime, it sweats rivulets of Tarantino-era digital anxiety from all pores--every kick, punch, pan, and zoom exaggerated for maximum impact.

A dazzling heist film that can't help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, South Korea's number one box-office champ of all time is never less than clever.

Private Property abounds in inventive low-budget filmmaking while stress-testing a pulpy, dime-store premise.

It's well established by now that the mythic Old West was always a trope written and controlled by men, and that there's really no bottom to which men won't stoop when women are a scarce quantity. In its mad rush toward performative allyship, the film exhausts every possible means of conveying those bombshells.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.

It's as unsparing a sketch of twentysomething life in New York City as American independent cinema has yet offered.

A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.