Wes Greene

All the President’s Men’s masterstroke is how it rejects mythologizing the pivotal history behind it, appropriately forgoing a climax by closing on a simple telex furiously relaying messages. The film doesn’t present two underdogs bringing down a president; it’s two reporters doing business as usual.

The film surprises by revealing deeper layers to both its subjects and social commentary.

The film has an atmosphere of endless experimentation, which compliments the constant revision the subjects apply to their lives in the wake of their economic insecurity.

The film’s quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.

The film’s cramped compositions hauntingly underline the claustrophobic nature of its protagonist’s life.

Much of the film’s power comes from a series of deft, often wry juxtapositions between video and audio.

In the hands of its cast, Mass gives such precise and profound expression to the totality of grief that it comes to feel downright palpable.

In its visionary dream and flashback sequences, the film becomes a comment on the rapidly diminished state of traditional animation.

The film is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror.

The doc is too enamored with Cenk Uygur and his convictions that it hews more closely to being a conventional and one-sided biographical portrait.

The Nature of Love engages with the stylings and bubbly tonality of the classic rom-com in ironic fashion, along the way exploring complex aspects of human behavior.

The film plays like one of the Grateful Dead's seminal concerts: protracted and digressive, yet intricate in its design.

The film abounds in honest and at times disarmingly off-the-cuff moments that are borne out of character contrasts.

This a much leaner film in terms of narrative incident than In the Family, though it paves the way for Patrick Wang to step into new artistic terrain.

The trust that Bulletproof's filmmakers have in their cast and their talent is humanely and succinctly illustrated throughout.

The film's pale-hued, Flash-like animation is abundant in detailed backgrounds that make the characters stand out like placards, allowing for Jian's critique of modern China to land with maximum force.

A rigidly predetermined film that runs on the fumes of hackneyed plot points, squandering at nearly every turn a humanistic study of a family's struggle to maintain a tenable bond with one another.

Throughout A Family Affair, time is continually collapsed to the point where events separated by many years bleed into one another.

The film may not suffer from didacticism, but it’s at its most volcanic when it promises to blossom into a study of a generation’s financial difficulties.

The doc emerges not so much as a glimpse into the mind of a dying artist than as a factual drama on how loved ones are impacted by an individual's death.

The unflashy, austere visual style of the film is but a veneer over writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli's deceptively radical treatment of the musical biopic.

Via the film’s juxtaposition between footage of Jones performing in front of fawning crowds with the dark personal stories of those who knew him best, Nick Broomfield bitingly undercuts the rock star’s veneer of public adoration.

Monica is an unsentimental exploration of its main character’s search for personal fulfillment through human connection.

The film is at its most effective and engaging when simply capturing the vibrancy of a world onto its own.

Rarely do the interviewees express their own thoughts on Beltracchi, as Birkenstock lets him speak for himself, for better and for worse.

The film tends toward the dramatically monotonous, but its unwavering sense of purpose ensures that it’s also compellingly human.

The sobering quality that informs both the documentary's aesthetic and content largely suppresses any spontaneity or much-needed moments of levity.

The unbalanced appraisal of Vidal's life and work in Nicholas Wrathall's documentary diminishes the effect of the writer's engaging dissension of American political policy.