The film might make a fit double feature with the recent über-patriotic atrocity Act of Valor.
Mark and Jay Duplass add an easy everything-is-connected spirituality to their established and by now unwieldy stew of modes and themes.
Saviors in the Night manages to avoid some, if not all, of the problems that have plagued recent films about the Holocaust.
With Project X, the teen sex comedy reaches its apocalyptic stage—almost literally.
It’s most concerned with calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its characters.
Act of Valor is a film whose cinematic ineptitude is matched only by its ideological rottenness.
The Albanian-set The Forgiveness of Blood unfolds as a parable about the follies of blood feuds.
While his work with children remains impeccable, Kore-eda Hirokazu proves considerably less successful in dealing with the adult characters in his latest film.
Michael Glawogger’s Whores’ Glory offers a revealing, troubling look into a trio of environments of prostitution.
Putin’s Kiss fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles.
By treating his hot subject matter with cool detachment, Markus Schleinzer depersonalizes his portrait of criminality.
It’s when the film falls back on the most familiar tropes that it runs into the most trouble.
By now the obsessive need of (generally young, male) characters to document every aspect of their lives via HD cam has been well noted by contemporary cinema.
Even when the film hits on some shrewd truths, it always feels timid about digging too deeply into its characters’ inner lives.
The film believes that cataloguing items of cultural and social significance is akin to addressing them.
Frederick Wiseman’s stance of objectivity makes the documentarian’s films both richly engaging and perpetually problematic.
Yes, the title of Albatross is a metaphor.
As a suspenser, Beneath the Darkness is pretty much nil.
The challenges of making a film about historical atrocity are notoriously knotty.
The film has too many weak, unconnected strands, too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere.