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.