The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.
The Chair too often downplays its potentially thorny political subject matter.
The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.
It’s an earnest, genuine attempt to show the familiar hardships of a relationship, specifically one between two women.
Lynn Shelton’s film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.
There’s something remote and stiflingly preordained about Mark and Jay Duplass’s series.
As in Gillian Robespierre’s prior collaboration with Jenny Slate, the film’s studied amiability becomes obnoxious.
Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.
Linas Phillips’s contrived sense of follow-through betrays the truthfulness of his initial characterizations.
Man Up’s quick-paced, quippy dialogue aims for screwball sass and sizzle but doesn’t quite hit the mark.
J. Davis’s Manson Family Vacation is a disarmingly unpredictable tale of reconciliation between two brothers.
Of greatest damage to its coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.
This is a slight but moving and unusual addition to the canon of modern American films depicting the plights of young(-ish) adults adrift.
In The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued.
Mark and Jay Duplass add an easy everything-is-connected spirituality to their established and by now unwieldy stew of modes and themes.
The core framework of The Do-Deca-Pentathlon feels a bit too basic and familiar for Mark and Jay Duplass.
Other directors might have played the film as social satire, but the Duplass brothers want us to laugh with, not at, their characters.
Jay and Mark Duplass inch closer to successfully infusing comedy-of-awkwardness with pained pathos in Cyrus.
The funny, truthful character studies of the Duplass brothers fit right into the festival’s laidback yet professional vibe.
Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig’s efforts seem calculated to discourage enthusiastic amateurs from getting anywhere near a camera.