Clayton Dillard

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.

Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.

Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.

The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.

Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.

The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.

The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.

The issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.

The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.

Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.

Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.

The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.

It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.

The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.

The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.

On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.

The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.

As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.

While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.

The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.

The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.

Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.

Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.

Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.

The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.