The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.
Shannon Murphy’s stylized melodrama captures a terminally ill teenager raging against the dying of the light.
The film is an old-fashioned and straightforward tale of brave opposition to the Nazi occupation of France.
The film never veers into wink-wink self-consciousness that its opening might have suggested.
The film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.
The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.
Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.
The film serves as both caustic update to Victor Hugo’s monolithic novel and cautionary tale about the future.
This colorful but remote-feeling documentary functions almost as though it were taking orders from the late Merce Cunningham.
This sharp, to-the-point portrait of the crook, fixer, and right-wing pitbull resists the urge to darkly glamorize him.
Its inquisitiveness gives all the melodramatic incidents more of a charge and a purpose for keeping our attention.
Richard Ladkani’s documentary bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger.
Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn’t occur.
The choreography is as brutal as you expect, but the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.
The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.
Werner Herzog’s documentary is a rare example of the arch ironist’s capacity to be awed not by nature but by man.
Alison Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall documentary cuts Trump’s Rasputin down to size but doesn’t completely dismiss his power.
Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.
The film is an un-aerodynamic vehicle of uncertain design, packed carelessly with origin storylets and pop-cultural flotsam.
Artistically somewhat monotonous but substantively devastating, the film doesn’t conclude with much in the way of closure.