What makes Human Capital a worthwhile experience is the way [Virzí] focuses on understanding his characters’ desires, rather than deriding them as unworthy.

Appropriate Behavior is very funny, even while it’s also being real and heartfelt. It’s a raw story with refined production values, and Akhavan is so open and true in the lead role that what could be an overly insular story instead feels relatable and amusing.

Vessel is much more than a documentary about abortion rights; it’s about the conviction, creativity, and sacrifice that goes into creating a movement.

The greatest achievement of Middle Of Nowhere is that DuVernay and Corinealdi make Ruby’s big decision believable, by showing how it’s really just been a series of smaller choices.

Even Neeson can’t rescue this halfhearted shrug of a movie.

There’s a sketchbook quality to La Última Película; it’s like notes for a movie that never really got made. Because the film is stubbornly unpolished, it all but dares viewers to scratch their heads and say they don’t get it.

For all the good intentions and native hands behind the camera, The World Made Straight never seems particularly credible or convincing as a fresh look at regional history.

As well-intentioned as it is thoroughly inept, Black November would be a serious contender for year-end worst lists if it weren’t so painfully noble and sincere.

There’s a clarity to Snook’s emotional journey that’s absent from the rest of the film—a fact that’s partly deliberate, since Heinlein and the Spierigs mean to dive into the soup. But amid the murky genre experimentation, it’s a beacon of truth.

Something, Anything is the rare film that gently asks the big questions, then gives us space, and room.

The film works best when it focuses on the talking heads. Reuveny captures everyone’s initial reactions to the news and how their feelings change over time, uncomfortable silences and all. She knows exactly when to cut and when to pause, to let those moments of silence speak for the deceased, and let the pain of the past resonate within the frame.

For all the formidable intellect that went into its conceit, When Evening Falls On Bucharest has a slightness that isn’t helped much by the weight of the discussion, which occasionally presses it into a flat soufflé. But Porumboiu’s insight into the filmmaking process itself is often fascinating.

[Graf's] handsomely mounted, beautifully acted epic biopic (running just shy of three hours) succeeds in reducing the lives of three important figures in German literary history to a rather banal love triangle.

It’s a handsome disappointment, fast food masquerading as fine dining.

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

Chandor’s film suggests more than it can explore, and a contrived climax makes the film seem like less than the sum of what’s preceded it.

Even with a strong first half lampooning the vapidity of American news media, The Interview is the worst thing Rogen has ever done.

Big Eyes contains comedy and tragedy, too, but they pair much less agreeably here, in part because each of the film’s two protagonists belongs much more to one world than the other.

Unbroken just piles on the misery without tonal shift, any sense of rise and fall, or any interest in Zamperini’s inner life, beyond his catchphrase, “If you can take it, you can make it.”

Leviathan itself feels like a brave, lonely act of rebellion against the system, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of it ever working in the people’s favor. It advocates for a stiff drink.

DuVernay stages well-known public events like the “Bloody Sunday” march with scrupulousness, scope, and a gut-wrenching visceral power. But Selma’s true success is as a chamber piece, not a thundering historical epic.

A lesser filmmaker, and a lesser actor, might have made American Sniper into an unthinking bit of jingoism. Eastwood and Cooper keep finding respectful complexities in Kyle’s story, until the film reveals itself as too simple to have much use for them.

It’s a film that captures humanity at its best and its worst, sometimes simultaneously.

As a film, Into The Woods is trapped between the stage and the screen, at odds with both its source material and its adopted medium.

Wyatt is a supremely confident filmmaker. His style is multitudes sleeker than Reisz’s original, but his eclectic taste, particularly in the soundtrack, reveals a true connection to the earlier era.

Song Of The Sea is a triumph of design and animation, populating lavishly detailed, patterned backdrops with characters so simplified that they could’ve been cut-and-pasted from a newspaper comic strip.

Even for the third entry in a family franchise, the construction is lazy to the point of indifference.

When Annie isn’t functioning as a showcase for Wallis’ tiny preternatural charm, it’s tonally varied to the point of discombobulation.