Joseph Jon Lanthier

Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.

Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.

The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.

The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.

Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.

The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.

Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.

The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.

Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.

An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance.

Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.

Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.

The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.

Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.

Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.

Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.

In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.

Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.

The lack of plausible conflict mars the movie's highly commendable depiction of San Francisco as a the new porn capital.

What keeps the documentary from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved.

Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism?

Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance.

The specific narrative handicaps throughout are mostly too banal to warrant exegesis, though the choice of vintage pop tunes for dramatic underscoring is particularly grating.

The documentary veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit.

Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.

The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.

After 30 minutes or so, Gonçalo Tocha's anthropological proposition slides into dubiousness.