The Look of Silence feels more like an extended DVD extra to his genre-defying previous film than a stand-alone documentary.

Shallow self-congratulation for American moxie at the expense of everyone and everything around us.

The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

The ending of The Quiet Girl is modestly dramatic compared to what has preceded it, but the emotional charge we are presumably supposed to feel has been cut off by all the contemplative long shots that have kept us for so long at arm’s length.

It makes a solid case for itself as filmed entertainment, while also suggesting strongly that it really ought to be seen in person in a theater.

While there’s a lot of commendable chutzpah and curious longing baked into The Green Knight, the movie’s never as compelling as it is unusual.

Its powerful moments are too often swamped by melodrama that undercuts the director’s skills as a storyteller.

Instead of making us feel that these boys are meant to be together, God’s Own Country unintentionally suggests that Gheorghe should get himself to a city where his silky dark hair, bedroom eyes and developed aesthetic sense might be far better appreciated by others.

Sirât is bold in its depiction of a decaying world in which some people can still find release. But its insistent brutality feels less bold than exhausting, and the question asked by one of the characters – “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” – has an easy answer: Hell, yeah.

Filmmaker and subject also share a disdain for restraint, shouting and jostling to ensure we’ve gotten their point. But while their parallel passions aren’t exactly subtle, they do make their mark.

In superlative previous films like “The Host” and “Mother,” Bong elevated, then transcended, the humble genres of the monster movie and the murder mystery by refashioning them into exquisitely heart-wrenching human drama. Disappointingly, then, his alchemical touch is absent here. Snowpiercer warms the heart, but doesn't penetrate it.

It is basically a standard triangle drama that has been stretched out to an interminable length.

20th Century Women mainly overcomes its flaws through the sheer imaginative sensitivity of Mills’s writing.

Instead of playing like the first of a series of Adonis Creed movies, Creed never rises above being one more by-the-numbers “Rocky” retread.

Love is Strange boasts an abundance of patience and kindness — but not much of a pulse.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Fran Kranz’s choice of subject matter for his feature debut is certainly timely and provocative, but the emotions are too big and too messily human to fit into the tight box he has constructed to contain them.

What [Cregger]'s getting at seems a lot less frightening, and a lot more contrived, than it would have had he not invited us to ponder more powerful possibilities for over an hour before tipping his hand.

Top Five is that movie precisely so good and yet still so flawed that you can watch greatness slip out of its ambitious but awkward reach right in front of your eyes.

It's a lengthy burlesque on paranoia, on conspiracies both real and imagined, so dazed in its color schemes that Anderson clearly wants you to get stoned watching it. But the sense of being blissfully out-of-it, which can have its pleasures, soon drifts into another aspect of drug use: detachment.

Though it’s bolstered primarily by the charisma of Bale and Damon’s performances, the soulless yet thrilling Ford v Ferrari doesn’t provide much more than huffy banter, corporate rivalry, and an adrenaline rush. The real-life characters deserve more than that.

Where a lesser film could fall into feeling like it is just hitting issues without exploring them, Young Mothers always grounds the bigger issues in real characters. It finds genuine emotion in capturing how this is not something abstract, but a reality with which they’ll have to contend.

The writing in The Wound can be conventional and overly explanatory, but this doesn’t matter because the subject is so fresh.

Saving endangered animals is not a matter of sentimentality and lifting one up above another. It involves facing hard facts and brokering some compromises, and Trophy makes us fully aware of this.

This movie version sometimes feels evasive or incomplete, partly because you can describe some things in a book that you cannot show on a screen, but it is in most ways an admirable adaptation that does look and sound like memories of a particular childhood.

It’s understandable that The 40-Year-Old Version is intentionally scattered, because it is about a woman grasping at straws in order to find her place in this very rigid space, both professionally and personally. But the film lacks the finesse to tell that story more cinematically, even running way longer than it should, as it roams towards a satisfying conclusion.

Borrowing a few biographical details from Stanton’s life, the virtually plotless drama exudes admiration for its nonagenarian muse, but it’s built so sparely that it doesn’t have much to offer anyone who doesn’t already share its reverence for the “Paris, Texas” actor.

It takes a group that bumped up against the boundaries and instead just operates within them.