Viktoria occasionally bites off more than it can handle, but even as it threatens to become unwieldy, it always feels essential.

The ineffective quality of the music composition rubs off onto the script, a dragging narrative occasionally punctuated with workable humor.

The Next Cut is a love letter to Chicago, and a plea for a better city, but it’s a sermon when it should have been a conversation.

First Monday in May gathers together some of the most influential and radical contemporary figures in fashion, offers a comprehensive view into the creation of a groundbreaking fashion exhibition, and profiles one of the most exclusive figures in the world. And yet, somehow it all feels incredibly familiar.

While Don’t Think Twice depicts a certain world with incisive specificity, its themes of what success truly means are universal to anyone involved in the arts.

King Cobra is a lurid piece of business that, at times, goes gleefully over the top while lacking the kind of gut punch you might expect in the film’s third act.

This hard-boiled noir is the real deal.

Some of these shorts are worth the ten or so minutes they take, but none of them justify wasting time on Rio, I Love You.

There’s no doubt Hockney deserves appreciation for his artistic influence, but this documentary is less a reflection of his singular presence than the result of haphazardly mashing together a fascinating life.

Johnson structures the movie early on as if it’s the out-dated kooky B-movie version of itself and even when the two heavyweights get down to it, she refuses to frame the film in lofty terms.

Hologram is a fine experience as a tranquil matinee entertainment, but it fails to pull off its own illusion because it never quite understands what sort of story it really is telling.

Bispuri’s feature debut makes a powerful statement about the suffocation that can come with gender norms, and about the double-edged sword of gender performance.

Pryce and Holder are perfectly suited to the roles and form an authentic chemistry that excels above workplace formalities.

In the end, like a breath of stylized, impassioned hot air, L’attesa evokes feelings associated with bereavement effectively but has nothing substantial to add to the whole psychology of loss.

While each entry satisfies in its own unique way, the anthology as a whole makes for an impressive examination of distaff fears and underestimated ferocity.

In spite of all of its myriad shortfalls, this film succeeds as well as it does because it does not shy away from this truth, and because it gives us a romances that feel so true between people we would like to see succeed.

Many of the cuts and interplay between subjects seem like filler rather than commentary; the lightshows of LEDs and flashlights dancing off the dank walls of sewers reveal no more than a flashy visual sensibility.

There’s a potentially good story to be mined here, probably most likely with the mother, but every time it starts to find fertile emotional ground, it can’t help but become distracted and search for another surface.

Acid drips from every line and visual gags double as celebrity commentary while still delivering sublime slapstick. Even if it sometimes stops making sense, My Big Night never loses its sensibility.

While Green Room features a number of ingeniously crafted set pieces, it quickly winds up as an excessive, borderline pornographic revelry in extreme violence.

Rushed and full of cinematic artifice, Gallenberger and Torsen Wenzel‘s script reveals itself to be devoid of the naturalism the leads are desperately trying to supply.

For pure spectacle alone this film is well worth the ticket price. Its visuals are so undeniably convincing and intricate that the sheer wonder of how they achieved any of this will be enough to distract — from the story’s missteps and even the film itself.

The Sokurov of Francofonia seems different from his usual self — more doubtful, uncertain in his focus, perhaps more open. And the film duly mirrors the attitude of its maker, jumping from one barely formed thought to the next, tracking back, mixing things up, like we all do while visiting a museum, and letting distraction get the best of us for a minute.

Many will find the film’s final twist hard to take, especially after an unnecessary coda, but Remember remains a thought-provoking revenge drama that questions the ethics of violence so many years later, when memory, let alone hatred and guilt, has long gone.

The film’s pitfalls lie in the style-over-substance route that has befallen many films that have such an annoyingly gimmicky framing device at its center.

As the tension effectively builds and pay-off is pulled off with aplomb, The Invitation is a mostly effective small-scale thriller, despite some missteps along the way.

The Boss can at least be appreciated for trying to lead its main character on an honest-to-god arc, which is more than many loosey-goosey movies of its ilk can say.

Demolition might just be this year’s poster child for disaffected faux-indie insincerity.