As drama the film mostly serves to illustrate the two sides of this crucial social debate in Africa.

The chosen style of animation leads to a distracting choppiness that renders the movements, gestures and facial expressions of the interviewees unconvincing. The other problem is that, memory naturally being something that returns in fits and starts, the film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust.

Despite its successful attempts to show how oil has affected everyday citizens in nearby Nigeria, the film remains fairly dry.

For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.

The movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.

A long, leisurely drama directed with self-assurance.

The film clearly wishes to explore the topic of children having children, but it only inspires a great desire to smack them both.

It’s unlikely to be remembered with any great fondness by all but Almodovar diehards, its self-regarding inwardness suggesting that he’s struggling, as his hero is here, to find something new to say.

The use of music and sound design is very thoughtful throughout, capturing the way music by street performers makes life in the city feel like a musical all the time while the murmur of traffic and general hubbub creates its own atonal backing track.

The main problem of Happy as Lazzaro is that it's unclear what Rohrwacher finally wants to say in part two, which combines the near-documentary realism of her first feature with the occasional flights of fancy of her second.

There are eight individual decisions to be made here, yet Beauvois never humanizes any of his monks. The film instead consumes itself with songs, communal prayers and nightly meals.

That nobody becomes a realized character with an emotional arc is just a place American Factory falls a little flat.

Hard luck conspires with bad sex in this unspectacular Austrian tale of crime and punishment.

Ironically, Sirat gets muddled near the end. Although the last act is in many ways the liveliest — viewers will be jolted by a series of bleak twists — it’s also where Laxe relinquishes narrative coherence in the service of making his metaphors more literal.

From a sensory point of view, the film is a pleasure, the images having been manipulated in various ways to evocative effect, Anderson’s voiceovers proving more amusing than not, and the music taking mostly lively turns.

This intoxicatingly stylish work is all over the place, a hot mess at times so ravishing it sends shivers down to the toes. Unfortunately, it’s also at times just plain crass and silly.

Boys State inevitably feels more and more like reality TV programming, which is both appropriate for our times and depressing.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

The film captures the energy, the stresses and the tension of people striking punching bags and each other but without narration, it all feels a bit random and uninteresting.

A penchant for suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long mar Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain, an otherwise engaging drama about an immigrant Arab family in France.

Office is undermined by a simplistic screenplay lacking the nuances and frisson one expects of a cutting-edge satire of a capitalist world propelled by graft and greed.

It is good-natured, lowbrow, backlot, hit-or-miss humor, but with no cumulative effect beyond its succession of hard-worked jokes. More theatrical than cinematic in its conception, this group effort relies on the improvisation of its performers.

Impressive in parts, but wildly uneven as a whole.

Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening.

More pictorially arresting than intellectually coherent.

Jewish and academically inclined audiences worldwide will respond to numerous aspects of this unusual drama, although it is paradoxically both too broad and too esoteric for the general art house public.

Turns Jane Austen's nimble satire into a lumbering gothic romance.

Especially in light of a short parable Cam tells early on about work and retirement, it's pretty obvious that Abbie's voluntary imprisonment is meant to reflect an American underclass that can't imagine any kind of life beyond our late-capitalist constraints.

Though the message comes across loud and clear, the four tales suffer from being narratively uneven, making the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time seem long indeed.

Fans of Gomes’ breakthrough 2012 feature, Tabu, will find much to love here as well, and in terms of craft his latest offers some truly beguiling moments. But anyone looking for a good story, or characters to get hooked on, may find themselves admiring the scenery without ever relishing it.

Atmospheric but pedestrian, it is a retelling of the classic tragedy of all civil wars, from the U.S. to Vietnam to England, where brother is pitched against brother.

I got bogged down frequently in the familiarity and intentional messiness of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger chose to tell, while at the same time wondering what sense a wholly unaware viewer would be able to make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.

Trite, grim and feebly provocative.

The project suffers badly from being largely improvised as the pair fall back on familiar impressions and old jokes. Lazy and indulgent, it smacks of being what the British call a "jolly," that is a freebie with no obligation to turn in work afterward.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

After a while, the extremely limited camera movement and languid pacing take an exacting toll, resulting in a viewing experience that is considerably less than idyllic.

Though handsome in style and admirable in ambition, this sprawling neo-Western never comes together as a satisfying whole.

Since from her other features it is clear she's an uncompromising director, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this film is as unapologetically personal and self-absorbed as it is, making no attempt to draw in viewers perhaps unfamiliar with the filmmaker.

Acutely observed but gloomy and lacking narrative, it tells of 12 months in the life of a decent but dull suburban couple and their friends, most of whom you would go out of your way to avoid at a party.

Nothing if not true to its title, this frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun. But at two hours-plus, it becomes unrelenting and wearisome.

Ultimately, the heavy-handed and annoyingly obvious aesthetic wears thin.

Coming Home sinks into a conventional tragic romance rut that not even engaging performances by Gong and Chen can save.

Certainly for most audiences the viewing experience will prove not only tedious but bewildering.

The drama does eventually come full circle, but it’s gone so far off the rails by that point that it’s hard to bring us back.

All the action is staged with energy, but it gets relentless without anything really funny going on.

The ultimate effect of [Östlund's] studied techniques is more restricting than beneficial, which, combined with a protracted running time, faintly self-righteous air and a perplexing, misguided coda, produces a sense of letdown at the end despite the strength of much that has come before.

On their own, individual scenes are effective enough in semi-farcically portraying the ignorance, avoidance and/or downright denial by the practitioners of bad loans. Together, however, they are wearying in their repetitive nature.

The dissected minutiae of this adultery drama unfortunately doesn't add up to a very original or moving whole.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

There's little in the way of genuine depth, complexity or nuance here, Diaz instead seeks to convey the illusion of profundity by having various characters throw around weighty social and philosophical verbiage in thuddingly sophomoric fashion.

By this time, cinematographer Fred Kelemen's mostly stationary camera has revealed about all there is to see in a fine array of textures in such things as the wooden table, the rough floors, the walls of stone, the ropes on the horse and the skin on the boiled potatoes. That does not, however, make up for the almost complete lack of information about the two characters, and so it is easy to become indifferent to their fate, whatever it is.

This puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising, very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That becomes apparent almost as soon as the investigation gets underway and the movie starts losing its fizz.

Michelle Williams does her best but she cannot prevent Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, a weak tale about being broke and on the road in rural America, from dwindling into boredom.

The Queen of Versailles will prompt loathing not only among the so-called 99 Percent, but among those in the top 1 percent who would like someone more sane to represent them on camera.

A picture whose tone wanders between arid academic exercise and something close to parody of the more pretentious trends in current auteur cinema.

This tale of a despondent man's attempt to find someone to help him commit suicide never really hits the emotional heights it should; it may be that the film's proponents are confusing simplicity with profundity. [30 Sept 1997]

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.

The premise of this Hungarian/German/Swedish co-production is solid, even if the execution feels a little slack and the running time too long.

If ever a film cried out for the 3D treatment, it's The Mill & the Cross, an ambitious but frustratingly flat attempt to explore, analyze and dramatize a masterpiece of 16th-century art.

Working from a diligently researched screenplay by his late father, Jack Fincher, the director has made a high-style piece of cinematic nostalgia that's a constant pleasure to look at but only intermittently finds a heartbeat.

Ricky struggles with underbaked narrative threads and breathless direction that can verge on unfocused.

Buying Pepe as misunderstood and buying Pepe as a character destined for redemption are two different things, and it's the argument after the buildup where Feels Good Man stopped feeling persuasive for me. Your hopefulness may vary.

Part Two is plagued by a nagging shallowness when it comes to portraying the Fremen, an indigenous people fighting for self-determination within the empire; the film has difficulty fully embracing the nuance of Herbert’s anti-imperial and ecologically dystopian text.

So like much of this film, the viewer is turned into an observer. You never feel close enough to the action, either in the ring or in the kitchens, living rooms and tough streets where the story takes place. The characters engage you up to a point but never really pull you in.

This is a documentary about psychics that make you think Ouija boards might be a better investment.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a fierce presence in the title role and Chris Hemsworth is clearly having fun as a gonzo Wasteland warlord, but the mythmaking lacks muscle, just as the action mostly lacks the visual poetry of its predecessor.

The central character never develops in an interesting way. Well before the wrap-up of this brief tale, her cultivated recessiveness becomes tiresome and, in these particular circumstances, a bit dull.

The film doesn't really manage to sustain attention through its brief running time. But it is heartening to see that the filmmaker, now in his mid-80s, is as passionately engaged as ever.

While all the interview subjects are enthusiastic, the overall lack of familiarity with Rodriquez's personal background and career collapse begin to drag.

Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

Earnest and slow, the film takes time to reveal its intentions and the result is worthy but not engaging.

Perhaps Qu’s near-passive tone is meant to suggest that women don’t have much of a voice in society. But the story's almost complete lack of emotion also negatively impacts the viewers’ interest in the women’s plight. What does come through loud and clear is that Angels Wear White paints an unflattering portrait of not only how women are treated but also of how men try to protect their turf at all costs.

Though those glimpses don't add up to what most people would call a portrait, they do evoke a life of old-fashioned female pampering, and contain just enough of Sellam's quirky personality to make those habits charming.

While far too much of the film is staged discussion and smug political jousting, there is savage and lethal black irony.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

Directed by French director Anne Fontaine (Two Mothers/Adore, Coco Before Channel), this is another gorgeously appointed but also slightly overly formal film, with a muted emotional payoff that, while appropriate for the story’s convent setting, doesn’t exactly make for must-see cinema.

The film is attractively and professionally packaged however, with accomplished camerawork and editing supporting a narrative that eventually seems to reveal more smoke than fire.

Think of Please Give as a finely tuned short story with every glance and gesture full of suggestive meaning. Drama is not high on the agenda here. There is a bit of comedy and, briefly, sexual mischief even though it doesn't look like much fun.

One's appreciation of this film depends largely on one's ability to be amused by a Dadaist prankster and interest in the Pop Art scene in the middle of the last century.

The director's latest rise-and-fall chronicle suffers from a few structural problems that did not bedevil Senna or Amy. Most obviously, the subject is still very much alive, which may explain why this officially endorsed film feels more cautious and compromised than it might have been.

The pace is gently hypnotic and the topic fitfully interesting, but the format will test the patience of all but serious art-cinema fans with its narrow focus and chilly film-school minimalism.

Blue Ruin is a talented but sophomoric low-budgeter that straddles the divide between genre thriller and art piece with mixed results.

This overly meta farce beats its mildly silly jokes so steadily into the ground that it’s not so much a case of diminishing returns as humor abuse.

The story ends in a muddled rush, leaving many unanswered questions. Like a newly launched high-end smartphone, Ex Machina looks cool and sleek, but ultimately proves flimsy and underpowered. Still, for dystopian future-shock fans who can look beyond its basic design flaws, Garland’s feature debut functions just fine as superior pulp sci-fi.

The film is very invested in proving the validity of the social relationships created in virtual space. To me, that’s the easy part. Video games can absolutely be nourishing and substantive and healthy. And I’m not even sure Ibelin confirms that in a smart way.

It’s a pleasurable enough watch — nicely acted and with a gentle rhythm tuned to the main characters’ searching paths as they drift in and out of each other’s lives over 30 years — though ultimately, it lacks weight.

The film has two powerful, loosely connected stories to tell but not a unifying vision that could package the often-potent material for maximum impact.

While the filmmaking is raw, undisciplined and groaning under a cargo of self-conscious quirks, it scores points for originality and wacky creativity

While its two credible leads are certainly up to the challenge, there's a relentless claustrophobia that prevents the film from taking on a fully dimensional life of its own.

Without Denis’ typically transfixing aesthetics and with a storyline that lumbers along in places, High Life is not always an easy sit, even if occasional outbursts of violence spice up the action in distressing ways.

Even the art house crowd will find the film off-putting not only because of its vagueness but because of its thoroughly unlikable characters.

Despite a warmly interacting cast that includes Jennifer Ehle as Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine as her lion-maned, lionized father, and a valiant effort on the part of Nixon and Davies to externalize the poet’s inner demons in emotional, high-tension scenes, the film can’t escape an underlying static quality that extinguishes the flame before it can get burning.

At once impressive and indulgent, hypnotic and patience-inducing with its languorous rhythms. It is, in other words, decidedly not for everyone.

Mann, Hoffman and Feldman are clearly having a good time, and their comedic chemistry carries the film. But for the most part, Poetic License feels just as aimless as Liz, wandering from scene to scene without much of a vision.

While rambunctious and passably humorous, this offspring isn't nearly as imaginative and nimble-minded as the forerunner that spawned it.

A pictorially unusual but dramatically listless tale.