Jesse Cataldo

The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.

Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.

Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.

Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.

Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.

Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness.

Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.

Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.

Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.

Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.

Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.

Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.

Kurosawa allows for a few brief flights of fancy, further abandoning realism for whimsical bursts of glowing color, but otherwise it's a humdrum slog of a voyage.

Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.

Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.

The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.

Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.

The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.

It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.

By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.

Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.

Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.

The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.

A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.

It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.

It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.

The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.

The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.