Ava isn’t only banal, but also, in its half-hearted stabs at novel ideas, seemingly content with its banality.
Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.
Schimberg’s film isn’t much of an argument, just a provocative discussion.
The protagonist doesn’t deserve our sympathy, in part for how noxiously the film has imagined the female characters who surround him.
It’s flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.
Perry’s film receives a beautiful DVD transfer that has one foot rooted appropriately in the less varnished past.
The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
Arie Posin’s almost offensively “tasteful” dud remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters’ motivations.
While it tries to relate a story about the sloppiness of life, the way best-laid plans can go wrong in an instant, its script is neatly and tidily structured.
Its perspective may be above it all, but that doesn’t account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly.
Free Samples is an angry indie that favors hollow ridicule over credibility.
The Lie is a film about accountability that repeatedly absolves its lead character of the need to have any.
Today’s Special too often gets bogged down in its intergenerational culture clash.
Imagine if Death Wish ended by revealing that Paul Kersey had actually taken out a hit on his family.
If this is the best that out-of-order indie romances can get, why bother with them?
Part of that restless, productive team of mumblecore savants, Joe Swanberg allows his actors to do what they do best: act.
The film is a could-have-been camp classic, the tragic victim of an inability to revel in its own sense of humor.
Though good for a few laughs, the one-note Teeth is just another trite rape-revenge fantasy.