Wes Greene

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.

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

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

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

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

Like the characters, the film's exterior flash can't conceal a glaring emptiness.

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