Wes Greene

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.

Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.

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.

Seemingly channeling the spirit of Claude Chabrol, Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins is a decidedly classy throwback thriller about a seemingly humdrum character committing perverse acts of subterfuge against others.

The elegantly underplayed performances ensure that the film never succumbs to melodrama.

The filmmakers never effectively detail the characters’ relation to the various cultural, psychological, or historical intricacies of their milieu.

The film’s triumph is keeping us on our toes by sending us into an ether where fear and wonder live hand in hand.

The inadvertent effect of the oppressive, almost overbearing gloom that shrouds Falcon Lake is that it manages to sap the life out of its initially carefree depiction of young people’s emotional lives.

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

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

Sansón and Me has a way of frustratingly pulling focus away from its ostensible subject.

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

The film’s depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.

For as potent as the film’s shocks can be in the moment, it’s difficult to shake off that the screenplay lacks for the breadth of variety that’s necessary to make more than just a restaurant’s tasting menu take flight.

In simplistic and self-congratulatory fashion, the film renders its main character as a sort of feminist crusader who undermines the sexist traditions of her time.

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.

David Leitch’s film pulls off the notable feat of making human beings out of cartoonishly violent psychopaths.

The film’s ominous atmosphere derives less from the mystery of a disappearance and more from the scary business of getting older.

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

The film loses its satiric edge as it begins to melodramatically detail how Maurice Flitcroft inherited the mantle of folk hero.

Despite the mystery of the home invasion becoming increasingly tangential, Human Factors remains a compelling puzzle-box.

The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.

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

Not only does Infinite Storm lack for a complete vision, it’s all too comfortable in settling for mawkishness.

Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime.

Dog cannily smuggles a nuanced inquiry of a social issue under the guise of popular entertainment.

Throughout Last Looks, the filmmakers tend to a conventional mystery that could have benefited from more satiric intention.

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.

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.

The title isn’t only a promise of so much destruction to come, but also inadvertently an assurance that its most action-packed sequences will be defined by loudness, incoherence, and pointless cruelty.

With its pulpy thrills, hyperbolic dialogue, charismatic scumbags, and a score heavy in electronic effects and percussion, the film effortlessly coasts on a gnarly old-school vibe.

The film’s largely painful humor is informed by the mistaken belief that the main characters’ criminal enterprise is inherently quirky.

Kate will leave you wishing that its narrative possessed the same attention to detail as its elaborately violent action set pieces.

With an overload of winking, Kay Cannon’s Cinderella displays a contemptuous attitude toward fairy tales in general.

The film’s poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character’s identity crisis.

Together’s dramaturgy perfectly, if unintentionally, underscores the suffocating nature of pandemic living.

Reminiscence’s noir adornments inadvertently feel closer to parody than loving homage.

Writer-director Edson Oda never really puts a unique spin on the familiar story of otherworldly figures peering in on the lives of the living.

Across the film, director Augustine Frizzell balances a dynamic aesthetic energy with a generosity of spirit.

The Tomorrow War is little more than a clunky, Nolan-esque exercise in instruction-manual cinema.

The film doesn’t leave us with a complex sense of Hayden Pedigo as a person and political candidate trying to take on an unjust system.

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

After a while, the film’s elaborate, often breathtaking special effects come to feel like it’s only source of complexity.

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.

The film fails to effectively seize on how its main character’s life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist.

Ava isn’t only banal, but also, in its half-hearted stabs at novel ideas, seemingly content with its banality.

In lieu of pluming the emotional states of the characters, the film resorts to a whimsical, otherworldly fantasy element as an easy resolution.

The film refuses to shy away from the unvarnished honesty of Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon during his brief moment of fame.

Its sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound.

It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.

Director Alex Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to his thematically rich material.

It’s an unfussy, intimate chamber drama that’s fearless in confronting the attitudes of its exalted subject.

It's less of an insightful backstage documentary than a gushing, sycophantic love letter to the late Merce Cunningham.

Brie Larson’s directorial debut is nothing so much as a series of quirks.

In a film that features Charles Manson and his disciples, there’s something unsavory about presenting Sharon Tate as one of the crazy ones.

Writer-director Yeo Siew Hua suggests that becoming another person is as easy as dreaming it.

The title Weightless is an apt description for this stylish but emotionally inert film.

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.

What They Had gracefully coasts on its patient observations of one family’s dynamics, but once the third act hits, Elizabeth Chomko goes about neatly tidying up seemingly every loose end.

Right out of the gate, the film only sees a kind of blunt irony in this blurring of her public and private selves.

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.

Daniel Peddle's film emphasizes, for better and worse, the crushing monotony of living in insolated parts of the Deep South.

The impressionistic tenor of the unabashedly energetic final sequences is so wondrous that you may wish that writer-director Peter Livolsi had utilized it as The House of Tomorrow's guiding principle.

Courtney Moorehead Balaker's film is mostly a sobering dramatization of a true and controversial story in recent Connecticut history.

After a certain point, Olivia Newman's film treats the womanhood of its main character as an afterthought.

Cédric Klapisch correlates wine’s complex arrangement of flavors to the complexity of memory itself, which, it should be said, is the most nuanced of the filmmaker’s wine metaphors.

The potential comic absurdities of the premise are squandered as soon as the film settles into a tepid coming-of-age tale.

The film displays a sprightly tone and blissful sense of liberation in charting the exploits of characters seeking to live by their own feminine-centric rules.

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.

Laurie Simmons isn’t so much creating art as a means to explore cinema’s effect on identity as she is conducting an act of indulgence.

The film's hopscotching-in-time structure, informed by specific remembrances of Chavela Vargas's life, is refreshingly unconventional.

Given all its clumsily executed genre detours and tonal fluctuations, Rebecca Zlutowski’s film suggests an amateur juggling act.

Amnesia ultimately delivers rich insights about its main characters’ relationship to their backgrounds.

At its most honest, the film wrestles with the reluctance or unwillingness of women to fulfill ostensibly requisite roles.

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

The film's default mode is to lazily skewer suburbanites as cartoonishly privileged yuppies.

Throughout, the content and tenor of certain stories told by Mick Rock ambitiously inform the film’s style.

The faces in Logan Sandler's film, like the landscapes of the paradise setting, only convey an empty sort of ambiguity.

Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman's film immediately announces itself as a modest triumph of world-building.

The documentary advances its cause through an intimately diaristic depiction of hard work done well.

Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's Seasons is a nature documentary that reveals itself as a story of tragic usurpation.

Aaron Paul possesses an innate everyman quality that lends itself well to writer-director Zack Whedon's film.

Linas Phillips's contrived sense of follow-through betrays the truthfulness of his initial characterizations.

It ends on a muted whimper of a note that one doesn't expect given that the film's subject is such an immensely entertaining raconteur.

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

It plays like it was written by a bro who just discovered the early films of Quentin Tarantino.

Mirai Konishi's documentary inevitably reveals itself to be an elaborate infomercial for Westerners.

The film feels most real, even at its most absurd, when focused on the idea of closure as a kind of fantasy.

The filmmakers are thankfully willing to render, with unremitting vigor, how grief can batter the human heart.

The filmmakers refuse to promote a political agenda of their own in order to let the varied convictions of others foster a necessary dialogue.

Director Fredrik Gertten's Bikes vs. Cars is passionate but contradictory, a frustrating combination for a documentary that utilizes admittedly interesting data as a pitch to wean our car-crazed world off excessive driving.

The visible numbness and empty stares of the doc's three subjects painfully evoke years of being gripped by the war on drugs.

It may look like a dream, but it plays like someone reading a congressional report on corporate finagling out loud.

It's something unique for both a genre exercise and a documentary: a science-fiction film that doesn't contain an ounce of fiction.

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

A documentary whatsit acutely aware of the inherent performance people put into social discourse to maintain appearances.

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