Tasha Robinson

The hypnotic, clicky soundtrack, Bergès-Frisbey’s playful yet sad performance, and a few significant script moments laying out the film’s philosophy all aim toward a sleepy trance that helps put the biggest flaws into soft focus.

Charlie’s Country is sincere at the expense of nuance, and tragic at the expense of variety: It tends to hit its points over and over, with blunt, on-the-nose sincerity. But Gulpilil’s performance keeps it from crossing too far into hand-wringing preachiness.

Their best material, and the film's most authentically Southern humor, comes from their comfortable interactions, their funny tall tales, and their alternating shows of respect and good-natured teasing.

While "War Within" takes a deeper, more personal look at its protagonist, Paradise Now is a more ambitious film that better contextualizes its central characters and their politics.

While the film’s individual moments and images are often fantastically wrought, the story elements often seem as unintegrated as the moral exegesis.

Sky Blue is never subtle about its images of loneliness and isolation, or in fact about anything else. But as clichéd as its images are, they're still visually and tonally stunning.

It’s a ready-made cult movie, complicated and weird and grotesque and distinctly silly, and best when not taken remotely seriously.

Early on, it feels like it might become one of Allen’s best. Then the narrative direction becomes clear, the possibilities narrow, and the film shuts down along with them.

The film is as low-key and internal as the meditation it touts, and nearly as uplifting.

In some moments, White God is a fast-moving thriller... At other times, it’s a standard-issue slasher movie... But when Mundruczó pushes the camera in close on Lili or Hagen, it just becomes a family drama, and a portrait of longing—for freedom, for emotional reciprocity, for comfort.

Begin Again is all about the untrammeled joys of music, but like a hit pop song, it works better in the emotions than it does through any close examination.

Garcia's far-more-info-than-tainment style seems a little staid, but Future Of Food's clear, intelligent journalism and rich cinematography help take the edges off the immense brick of data Garcia lobs through the window of America's biotech industry.

Iris isn’t groundbreaking doc filmmaking, but it’s amiable and jovial in a way rarely seen in the field, which tends more toward drama, trauma, and forwarding big causes. Maysles doesn’t seem to have an agenda, beyond capturing Apfel as she is in this moment, as a complete, highly specific, and thoroughly charming character.

It’s sloppy and slippery, but for a $5 million movie, it’s remarkable.

Batkid’s story is fun in part because it’s so joyously frivolous. He’s cute because he’s a tiny version of a big thing. Trying to blow him up into something bigger than he is spoils some of what makes him special.

As with so many Merchant-Ivory films, The White Countess glides along on restrained, skillful performances and tapestry-rich cinematography, but its beating heart lies deep below the surface, where only determined viewers will find it.

Animated in much the same style as "Perfect Blue," but with greater depth and a more elaborate sense of playfulness, Millennium Actress is a visual feast, but also a mental gymnastics routine.

Deep Blue is a thrilling film, but not a thoughtful one; it'd be right at home on an IMAX screen, or possibly as the pretty, polished, and vaguely empty Successories poster it closely resembles.

Keanu Reeves is the perfect figurehead for this kind of yarn, as he was in The Matrix: Emotionless, poreless, and polished, his character is more a graven idol of vengeance than a human being seeking it.

It's a difficult balancing act, but Park crafts his layers carefully and masterfully. He's the kind of filmmaker who can meaningfully craft the gory details of an eye-gouging without ever forgetting the message that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

None of Ex Machina’s broad strokes are surprising: The story falls out so predictably at every stage that it can be frustrating. It’s the details that are surprising, and purposefully alarming.

For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.

Sayles' version of reality is grim, but it provides an enlightening, grounding reminder that there's a far more crucial world of politics going on behind the headlines.

There’s a good deal of the sick-and-twisted element of The ABCs Of Death here, but managed with better pacing, more maturity, and more room to build each segment.

Howard and Morgan make the journey intense enough to keep audiences guessing up to the finish line.

Uekrongtham films the saga in gorgeous style.

Episodic, detached, and lacking in drive, but packed with amazing, hallucinatory dream-imagery that makes real dreams look flat by comparison.

Taken as a whole, Blackfish does an admirable job of preaching without force-feeding, seamlessly blending opinion with reportage, and addressing its central issues from enough angles to make a series of end-runs around dubious viewers.

While Babette’s Feast is bleak, and often ponderous and stony, it eventually resolves as a moving hymn to art.

The film sometimes seems to get lost in self-admiration and its own melancholy mood. Still, Amirpour maintains that mood exquisitely well.

From a technical and filmmaking standpoint, nothing about Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower stands out.... It’s as dry and straightforward as a reputable news report. But from a content standpoint, the film is riveting.

Birth Of A Nation is powerful and effective, but it's spectacle that can't humanize or define its subject.

Favreau and Marks’ version is surprisingly daring in its use of violence, and its physical and emotional darkness. It’s also creative, occasionally in bizarre and colorful ways.

Comedy is rarely sympathetic to its victims, but by letting all the major characters serve as each other's karma engines, Stoller and the other writers create a hilarious world where everyone can be equally awful, and equally heroic, and equally ridiculous.

Waltz is the perfect villain in this setting: He's played this exact role before, as the smug, drawling, creepy aesthete who rarely stops smiling. But he's also capable of pivoting on a dime between real menace and garish, performative evil, between playing a subdued charmer, and the kind of movie-serial baddie who ties women to railroad tracks.

Star Trek: Beyond does have a strength that its two reboot predecessors lacked: it puts the focus squarely on the larger Trek ensemble, rather than solely on Kirk and his relationships.

Elio is a big-swing movie, an attempt to push viewers out of their comfort zones and into a strange new setting. But while it successfully blasts off to a colorful new world of wonder, it doesn’t always land.

At least there’s plenty to look at among Selick’s beautifully detailed characters, who each have expressive bodies and their own ways of moving.

The premise seems profound, but the claustrophobically inert execution lacks reach or imagination.

While the film will likely stick with viewers, it's ultimately a tossup what they'll remember most: the stunning buildup, or the massive letdown.

It's still a mixed bag with a lot of cutesy awfulness to wade through, but the acerbic ending is enough of a punchline to suggest that Westfeldt understands what a joke this kind of film can be.

There's no great art to Fried Worms' simple, family-friendly style and obvious clichés, but there's a refreshing lack of x-treme attitude, slapstick violence, and all the other things that make most kids' movies feel like they were generated by a marketing committee.

To some degree, it's trying to find the magic in the everyday, but the attempts to ground it are cringe-inducing and problematic.

As absorbingly weird and dark and sad as the film becomes, it still labors against jumpy construction, an irritating variety of visual styles and film stocks, and a crowded story that no one gets much individual screen time, which means that redemption for everyone comes far too quickly and neatly.

Nicolas Pesce’s gory writing and directing debut Eyes of My Mother goes all-in on the idea of a remote location where horrible things can happen, and no one will ever know. But Pesce does a lot more with the idea of isolation — emotional, physical, and even moral.

For the first time, the formula feels strained, due to excessive baby/dog humor and not enough Powell/Loy interaction.

It's all meant as gory good fun, but once the novelty wears off half an hour in, the rest of the film is only meant for people who absolutely agree with Giamatti's character about that violence thing.

A solid documentary feeling of “you are there” isn’t always a substitute for “…but here’s what happened when you left, and here’s what it all meant.”

It's Macbeth by way of “The Covenant,” all brooding pretty-boys with emo eyes and hipster hair, standing around in gauzily decorated rich-kid boudoirs in the dead of night, and at times, it's too overblown to take seriously.

Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.

Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.

Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.

It's a polished, beautifully shot story, and it acknowledges the messiness of real life. But like real life, it's often baffling and frustrating.

This take on Charlotte's Web has its tacky side, but when dealing with a book this simply sweet and this revered--and given what was done with White's similarly gentle "Stuart Little" only a few years ago--"It could have been worse" practically counts as high praise.

The film looks terrific, all Vermeer-style light/dark interplay and sleek design. And Portman is fantastic as the tempestuous Anne.

One amusing disadvantage of the crystal-clear, you-are-there 3-D cinematography, and the focus on the audience experience is that in practically every shot, it's easy to pick out off-message concertgoers who are bored, tired, or otherwise disengaged.

By comparison with the other Rings movies - the extremely high bar Jackson has already set for himself - Unexpected Journey falls short and feels muddled, yet too eager to please its fan base with an obligatory swordfight every few scenes.

Like the 2005 bestseller that inspired it, the movie version of Freakonomics is fleet and accessible, an enjoyably light and lively pop artifact aimed at bringing some unusual economic theories to the masses.

None of this is particularly sophisticated humor; again, it's Austin Powers goofery by way of Mel Brooks, though with a cooler, dryer tone and a much straighter face, embodied by Dujardin's vapidly winning grin, which admits no embarrassment or self-awareness.

Veteran slapstick fans may get a kick out of the free-form antics, and the party's chaotic ending is suitably memorable, but empathetic viewers are likely to be as uncomfortable with Sellers' improv as the partygoers he leads into havoc.

The results are too often ridiculously excessive--Kites generally reads like the Jerry Bruckheimer version of "Slumdog Millionaire"--but to anyone versed in Bollywood conventions, it’s a natural outgrowth of the genre, and a comically overwrought but still generally fun time.

Hollywood features can be hellish, but in Guest's view, they're no different from "Waiting For Guffman's" community-theater productions, and that's just an impossible message to swallow.

Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.

Surprise number one: It's smarter than it looks. Surprise number two: That doesn't entirely ruin it as an action film.

Cassel is convincing and riveting as Mesrine, which helps balance out the film's problematic slick shallowness and disconnects.

For all its ridiculousness, its enthusiastic comic excess, and its fart/booger/gross-out jokes, Diary Of A Wimpy Kid's heart is firmly in the right place.

It's all very clever and thought-through, but all the allusions don't much bolster the bland central romance or the paper-thin treatment of '60s social issues.

C7J isn't as cutesy as "Batteries Not Included" or "Short Circuit," or as grim as "Gremlins," though it resembles them all in its jerky, semi-comic look at the havoc and helpfulness of weirdo artificial life.

All this experimentation is enjoyable enough in the moment, but it's disappointing when Tykwer drops it in favor of a conventional, obvious ending.

Mostly, it just stands out in a crowded field of tacky also-rans by being a reasonably acceptable, more or less non-obnoxious way to spend an hour and a half.

It plays with comedy and drama, but keeps failing to commit to one or the other.

Despereaux at least has too much ambition rather than too little, but its curiously intellectual pleasures suggest a quaint puzzle rather than a passionately loved fairy tale.

Ignoring the weak storyline entirely, Rango is a joyously weird experience.

The film, lacking narration or much explanation of the character, is an outsider's version rather than his own. It's intriguing, but almost always frustrating.

It has its share of creepy moments, rising tension, and sudden-blast-of-music jump scares, but as a suspense story, it fizzles out surprisingly early.

Surprisingly realistic for an animated film of the time, but it's also as visually stiff and staid as any cut-rate sword-and-sorcery film, and just as formula-bound.

While Sanctum is frustratingly familiar, it's easy to get caught up in the action.

The problem with The We And The I: Gondry is focused more on moments than on the film as a whole.

Jack Goes Boating tells a tender story reasonably well, but it rarely lets viewers feel the emotions instead of thoughtfully observing them.

There's no getting around the fact that it all looks like a cutscene from a kiddie video game. It's a great showreel. Now someone give these folks a real budget so they can make a movie that looks as good as it sounds.

As Unmade In China gets more personal and less professional, it stops being a primer on filmmaking in a foreign environment with unfamiliar challenges, and becomes an onsite mouthpiece for a pouting, passive-aggressive filmmaker who desperately needs an outlet.

It’s frustratingly good at first, and then just frustrating, because it veers away from the things that make it unique, intelligent, and exciting.

All of Mirror Mirror is visually striking, even when it works on no other levels. But the humor is erratic, the heroism isn't necessarily compelling, and the whole thing feels like a grab bag of bits that don't entirely cohere.

On some level, the latest DreamWorks CGI project isn't a movie so much as a gag-delivery system wrapped in special effects. The story is crammed with incident, yet completely trifling; there are a ton of personalities, but no real characters.

The problem is that so little about Hooper's Les Misérables feels integrated. The cast feels like a grab bag of talented stage vets and garish stunt-casting choices, particularly Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter, who perform the fan-favorite comic number "Master Of The House" as a jerky, staccato series of show-off moves and attempted but inadequate scene-stealing.

It’s a Dada daydream of a movie, but no one who sits through it can complain that they weren’t warned up front.

Taylor makes the most of his tiny budget with creative editing and shooting, though his New York City is anemic, narrow, and underpopulated, and his constant repetition of the same damn 60 seconds of music becomes excruciating.

The cast is generally excellent, but Hartnett in particular comes across as convincingly complicated, alternately reprehensible and sympathetic.

Essentially, The Way starts out as "Eat Pray Love" and takes a long, surprising trip toward becoming David Lynch's "The Straight Story." And that's a longer trip than a mere monthlong trek across Spain.

Ocelot's 2005 semi-sequel, Kirikou And The Wild Beast, retains the gorgeously detailed visuals and that hilarious tonal bluntness, but loses much of the compelling mystery, and the urgency of life-and-death situations.

Take This Waltz is simultaneously a coming-of-age film, a love story, a breakup story, and an indie quirkfest, and it tries to do so many things at once that it can't hit many of its marks cleanly. But at least it's never boring, and rarely predictable.

The film's pieces don't always fit together, but even in isolation, some of those pieces are well worth watching.

There’s a lot of fantasy in the usual end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s a lot of horror there as well. Bokeh asks which of those reactions is more appropriate, and how they both play out. It’s a gentle story, as apocalypses go, but even without monsters, it becomes a painful, emotional question of strength and survival.

As mythic spectacles go, it beats "Clash Of The Titans," particularly in the areas of intimidating villainy and actual Titan-clashing. Nonetheless, it isn't any smarter than its inspirations, just prettier.

Dennis Quaid could stand in for Jeff Daniels' similarly toxic snob in "The Squid And The Whale," if only he were a little smarter and a little better-dressed.

House Of Sand is a gorgeous piece of cinema, but by the end, it just dries up and blows away.

It's pleasant and often touching, and the well-chosen cast sells what little drama they get, but there's no depth and little affect, and every would-be conflict peters out noncommittally.

Velvet Buzzsaw is a messy movie, and not just in the sense that Gilroy ends up painting a room with blood at one point.