The film’s lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.
Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.
It’s unclear how witnessing a family deal with their specific issues affects Jesus’s own perspective on his destiny.
More galling than the film’s litany of melodramatic banalities is its regressive view of race relations.
The film touches on the effects of a culture that puts too much emphasis on winning and money at the expense of simple healthy competition.
Katie Holmes’s character encapsulates her film as a whole: more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.
It all climaxes in a literal wrestling with the self that suggests a character finally grasping her own limits as an actress.
Nerdland exudes a self-satisfied smugness in its unvaried focus on the worst of human behavior.
Olds’s film is essentially a standard backwoods noir tale given a topical twist.
It broadly tackles the subject of love without, even at its least successful, stooping to the dire, barrel-scraping cultural condescension of Rio, I Love You.
Here’s a concert film that’s as fixated on backstage interactions as it is on the live performances themselves.
All traces of grit from Carney’s earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.
All the narrative hopscotching is little more than a superficial ploy to gussy up a clichéd redemption tale.
Writer-director Omer Fast’s Remainder suggests an allegory for a certain kind of artistic creation, one more interested in exactitude than spontaneity.
This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower’s internal performance.
Marcello’s film is by turns eloquent and shallow in its essayistic elegizing of a lost golden age.
The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.
My King might have been more resonant had Maïwenn allowed more time and space for her characterizations to organically develop.
Bellocchio’s aesthetics reflect the conversation between past and present in imaginative ways.
In the show’s third season, Ilana and Abbi continue to run up against caricatures of class and privilege.