Michelle Orange

Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.

Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.

What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance.

Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.

The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.

To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.

Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.

Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.

There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.

"Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.

No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.

[A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.

The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.

With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.

Off-handed and yet quite artfully observed, The Happy Poet's winsome deadpan offsets its skewering of class and sustainability issues, right through to a tricky ending that, like Bill himself, may not be what it seems.

The charms of what might charitably be called Silver Circle's homemade look and feel are limited.

Change may be elusive, Optimists confirms, but the will to make it blazes.

At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments

Proof that Ruiz was still teeming with ideas himself, Night is a characteristic work of surreal wit and circuitousness—and the filmmaker's winking but mournful goodbye.

Oblique and thickly layered with rhetoric, this account does little to illuminate Mumia the man, but it sets Mumia the statue aglow.

The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.

Greenfield works against her own interests with absurdly selective arguments and sloppy filmmaking.

We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.

Former "Frontline" producer Brian Knappenberger's fascinating, incisive social history of the online network known as Anonymous.

Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique.

In its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin's splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir.

It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.

The Dark Knight aspires to the epic and reaches it on a number of impressive and less impressive levels. That it is a frequently, unnervingly glorious triumph of brawn over brains is not despite but in spite of Nolan's admirably stubborn - if persistently, risibly serious - insistence that the modern superhero can have it all.