After the resounding triumph of On Body and Soul, a film whose stoic tenderness and tactile intimacy proved an outlier among recent Golden Bear winners, Ildikó Enyedi returns…
Blue Bayou’s reach for authenticity is entirely undermined by its empty, saccharine sheen of melodrama. In its broad strokes, writer-director Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou seeks…
Little Girl misunderstands where its focus should be and strips away most of its ambiguity, leaving little to really contend with. In the opening scene…
The Alpinist suffers a bit thanks due to a lack of access and more substantive commentary, but the frequent breathtaking feats captured are memorable enough…
Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller that grows in unsettling power across its runtime. Andreas Fontana’s Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller, carefully organizing a deceptively…
Dating abd New York offers sporadic pleasures, but can’t shake loose its obvious cribbing of familiar cinematic influences. Dating and New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature…
Language Lessons never quite becomes more than an acting exercise, but it’s still offers up intriguing questions about the disparity between online and offline personae. Among…
Memory House is little more than a mélange of affectations and overt symbolism, opaque for its own sake and succumbing to the worst arthouse pretenses. In…
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly…
Anne at 13,000 Ft. keeps its familiar portrait of an unraveling psyche fresh through its viscerality and opaque characterization. Anne at 13,000 Ft. only occasionally utilizes…
Faya Dayi is the best kind of documentary, one that eschews prefab forms and instead finds mesmerizing beauty in the quotidian. Programmed as part of Sundance’s…
Mogul Mowgli doesn’t quite know how to weight its issues or manage its scant runtime, but Ahmed keeps things raw and poignant. Rather strangely, Bassam Tariq’s…
Together is an endurance test for viewers and a self-satisfied pat on the back from the filmmakers. Stephen Daldry has become a bit of a punching…
499 boasts legitimate emotional weight, but undercuts its power with too much heavy-handed symbolism. Almost five centuries after the Spanish invasion of Mexico, a lone…
No Man of God works surprisingly well for a while, but fails to stick its schlocky landing. On the day before the official premiere of…
The Meaning of Hitler is a bold, risk-taking work from a confident directorial duo. Adapted from Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, a book that the…
Cryptozoo is both technically and thematically potent, but it’s the film’s third act which cements it as an exceptional and surprising animated work. In Cryptozoo,…
Ma Belle, My Beauty is a lovingly realized and mature look at polyamory, but it fails to probe its emotional core sufficiently. Polyamory is a subject…
Respect is a generic, overlong, unconvincing slog that’s disrespectful to the Queen of Soul’s legacy. When it comes to portraying pop culture icons known by millions…
White As Snow adds a wry wrinkle of feminist reclamation to its classic storyline, but unfortunately fails to successfully execute much else. Like so many other…