Its characters are ultimately too one-dimensional and their dialogue too theatrical to sustain an involving cinematic experience.
The film exposes the artifice required to bring to the screen the unadorned naturalness of the downtrodden in all of its heartbreaking glory.
The Samaritan treads a fine line between film-noir moodiness and crime-thriller triteness, mostly settling for the latter.
The film shares a kind of kinship with I Am Curious: Yellow and the way intellectual curiosity coincided with bodily passion.
It’s an anodyne tale of family-centered acceptance that’s neither comical when it wants to be nor touching when it strives for pathos.
While the documentary offers us a story that needs to be told, it does so in very non-Joffrey ways.
Jean Gentil is like a stinging and atmospheric Marxist anecdote.
Going Down in LA-LA Down is really a perfectly fun date movie for West Hollywood gays and their yogi fag hags.
This uncataloguable and entrancing film gazes back in nostalgia to a time of performance-art priapism.
The film is a cartoonish spectacle that paints its characters as clumsy, desperate, Prince Charming-seeking bimbos.
The film has a consistent documentary-like hyper-realist style that echoes Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth and Ossos.
We the Party feels legitimately hip, and faithfully symptomatic.
We’re rarely allowed a quiet moment to actually believe, or care, about the main character’s struggles.
The Wise Kids is a lovely little film that follows what fleeting moments of uncertainty do to a Baptist community in South Carolina.
This is a nasty little film that tries very hard to obscure its misogynist and racist premise through satiric social commentary.
From afar, you could easily confuse the subjects of the film for Anne Heche and a peroxided version of Sharon Gless.
When will independent filmmakers understand that formulaic film style can only spoil the non-traditional subject matter of their films?
Cirkus Columbia mostly leans on idiosyncratic and dry political humor reminiscent of Elia Suleiman’s work.
A lighthearted interclass romantic tale, Love interweaves stories of eight Beijing urbanites as they go about looking for happiness in rather clumsy ways.
Private Romeo feels more like a side project from the producers of Glee than some kind of novel queering of Shakespeare’s text.