By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.
Brad’s Status resonates because Mike White clearly sees Brad’s faults but refuses to judge him for them.
It suggests a human-interest story where all the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.
Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.
Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica’s professional struggles.
What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.
To some degree, Rough Night’s attention to character detail compensates for its weaknesses as a comedy.
The filmmakers lay the groundwork for us to take the story as speculative fantasy, albeit with a real-life outcome.
Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey’s emotional journey.
One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film’s pained beating heart.
Rama Burshtein allows us to form our own impressions based on what she presents to us of the Orthodox faith.
Laura Poitras doesn’t indulge in score-settling cheap shots, but seriously grapples with her contradictory subject.
According to Brian Shoaf’s Aardvark, a man’s psychosis boils down to an extreme case of sibling rivalry.
The film works as a sobering and, in its own way, inspiring look at Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently.
Death hangs over Lana Wilson’s documentary in grandly cosmic fashion.
Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith’s film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.
The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.
Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman’s rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.
Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.
It intimately focuses on its main character’s personal triumphs and refuses to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.