Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

This is a small film about a society of castoffs, and while it’s beautifully acted and often moving, it’s also predictable, because it keeps wresting itself into familiar forms.

There’s a real fascination in watching the gears of this massive machine grind. Once the student protest comes to dominate the film’s second half, however, things get dicier.

For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

It’s a valuable historical document, to be sure; as a movie, however, it’s a dry, grueling experience, lacking Shoah’s monumental grandeur.

No matter how much this story has been streamlined for accessibility’s sake, its import remains potent. In spite of numerous missteps, Pride gets that across.

Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.

Simien is clearly a talented, witty writer, with a fantastic sense of character development and dialogue, but he makes a lot of rookie mistakes as a filmmaker, from trying to cover too much ground in one movie to making stylistic choices that render Dear White People visually incomprehensible.

The main problem with Jodorowsky’s Dune is that a significant amount of what makes Jodorowsky’s work special gets lost in Pavich’s fairly ordinary approach to the documentary form.

The film is often a rough, searching, unfocused piece of work, but at a minimum, it affirms Bell as a talent to watch both as an actress and a writer-director, one with a strong, developing comedic sensibility.

For all three hours and change, it’s never less than interesting, but it’s also never much more than interesting.

The movie fails, but it’s like watching R.P. McMurphy try to lift that huge marble fixture in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—at least they tried, goddammit.

Gandolfini delivers a funny, poignant performance befitting a great actor. It’s heartbreaking that the film doesn’t measure up to his exemplary turn.

Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.

While some of the scenes feel contrived, the naturalistic performances never do.

If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.

Farahani’s elegiac documentary takes far more interest in Mohassess the man than Mohassess the artist.

Hittman demonstrates enough talent in It Felt Like Love to suggest that she could make a terrific film. All she needs is an original idea.

What keeps Horses lively is its sharp young cast—especially the two Rachids, who are also brothers in real life, and do an expert job of showing how Hamid and Yachine slowly change places.

The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.

Even though Gondry and Chomsky’s very different sensibilities don’t mesh in such a way that either man’s work gains substantially from the alliance, they’re each such good company individually that Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is still entertaining.

Haley and co-writer Marc Basch have their hearts in the right place.... But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist.

Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

The Skeleton Twins has a pair of terrific, sharply etched lead performances, a polished, autumnal look, and some affecting moments where its protagonists bond. But to borrow a water-based metaphor from the film’s overflowing stock of them, The Skeleton Twins just lies there, cold and clammy, like a dead fish.

It feels like 100 minutes of arch nudges, a highlight reel from Politicians Say The Darndest Things. Political junkies may find that appealing, but for more general viewers, the film—like Rick Santorum’s campaign—feels largely irrelevant.