Kenji Fujishima

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.

In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.

The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.

For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.

Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.

Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.

The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.

As stimulating as it is, the animation ends up being more pictorial than expressive—an initially fancy but eventually rather monotonous way to dress up what is ultimately a mundane drag of a detective procedural.

By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.

The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.

Much of the humor in Ripped fails to inspire more than a mild chuckle at best, in part because Epstein’s deliberate pacing sucks the air out of countless scenes.

The deeper Some Freaks wades into what becomes a series of sadistic and masochistic humiliations, the more McDonald’s film begins to feel schematic, with these characters little more than pawns in a screenwriter’s game of toying with our expectations.

Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

Brigsby Bear is so committed to its brand of self-congratulatory uplift that the filmmakers refuse to contemplate any of their material’s darker aspects.

Oldroyd...maintains such a rigorous distance from Katherine that she gradually seems less like a human being than like a mere carnival attraction.

What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.