Wes Greene

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

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.

In the end, Bent Hamer's view of current international relations comes to down to a treacly rendition of "Kumbaya."

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

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.

Watching actors interact with an authentic recording of a child on the brink of death is less an invitation to audiences to wrestle with the horrors of war and more with the ethics of the film’s creative choices.

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

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.

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

It passive-aggressively seems to suggest that anyone who isn't exactly interested in monogamy may be some kind of selfish, intolerable sociopath.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A well-intentioned story of an impoverished father searching for his missing child is muddled by an ambitious sociological agenda in Richie Mehta's film.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object.

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.

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

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

The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.

It may channel the loose, adrenaline-fueled lives of pilots, but the film's inconsistent, often impassive study of this intriguing real-life adventure feels half-told.

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

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.

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

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

Director Aviva Kempner profile of Julius Rosenwald suggests a 60 Minutes segment stretched to feature length.

Thomas Wirthensohn frequently sinks into dully positing Mark Reay as something close to the pinnacle of human integrity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects.

It offers a realistic portrayal of Momo's emotional state, but this comes at the expense of a deeper exploration into both the story's lush supernatural landscape and its inhabitants.

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

The comically rich visual tapestry of Blake Edwards’s The Party still endures.

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.

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.

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

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

The film isn't so much about "the end of cinema" as it is about the people who abuse the medium and their subjects for their own political agenda.

Perhaps Sanjay Rawal's most fascinating excursion into agriculture's dark side is the vineyards of Napa Valley, where the practically Eden-like scenery masks a dreary labor model.

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

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

As the psychology of the characters hardly connects with their distinctive milieu, the film merely suggests a conventional family drama littered with empty pot-shots at governmental authority.

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.

Even though the subtext about the past and modernity constantly being at odds throughout the setting's changing times is intriguing, the director presents this in a clunky, almost didactic fashion.

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

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

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

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

Yael Melamede doesn't dwell on each of her subjects' stories beyond the condensed version that's related on screen.

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

First-person accounts from individuals most affected by the drop in agricultural productivity are rarely the focus of the film's vision.

The eccentric artistry calls so much attention to itself as to make the subject of the film feel like an afterthought.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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