Nick McCarthy

Unable to reconcile plot with poetry, Bluebird is knitted-together by its sense of place and lived-in performances, yet unraveled by anemic false melodrama and overbearing music.

Rather than commit to exploring Jessabelle's existential crisis, the filmmakers opt to pile on the clichés straight until the rotten denouement.

Zero Motivation is refreshingly casual in the depiction of its female-centric environment, but the freshness of its performances is often compromised by a directorial impulse to reduce the female experience to spiteful girl fights, virginal malaise, and bunk-bed antagonism.

To varying degrees of success, it attempts to prominently display Al Carbee's creations, yet keeps undermining his art in favor of investigating his skewed relationship to everyday realities.

It's attempt at conveying a candid portrait of contemporary hookup culture and the dishonesty of online dating profiles, but the film's sentiments are all past their expiration date.

This inventive animated feature about depression and familial roots suggests NPR's "The Moth" storytelling series by way of Persepolis, mixing mesmerizing memoir monologue with whimsical animation.

Right up to its simplistic ending, the film is pleased to regurgitate the contrived tropes of the genre without ever honestly addressing the ethics of romantic boundaries.

A Summer's Tale's linear structure and sense of observation is simple yet inspired.

Like an astutely aching ballad, the film—aptly scored with sweet, strumming beats by Jean-Louis Aubert—is pleased to ambiguously infer the interior logic of its irresolute characters without pigeonholing their motivations.

The documentary is more interested in covering all its bases than making sure it fully has its foot on each base.

What results is a lopsided, put-upon narrative of survival where humans, and not the animals themselves, are the ones to be celebrated.

This is less a portrait of an artist as a young woman than a psychological evaluation of a slippery subject.

The patience in mercurially presenting the characters' backstories and desires is matched by the film's genuine curiosity about the healing power of sharing stories.

It does little to break free of the conventional talking-head documentary format, but thoughtful in how it prizes dialogue over acrimony and one-sided rhetoric.

Cavemen is an apt title considering how the sensibility and maturity of the film's characters don't seem to have developed beyond primal, alpha-man impulses.

Director Marielle Nitoslawaska's experimental approach sometimes wanders down uncontextualized paths and obfuscates the subject with filmic affectations.

The particulars of Laos's historical conflicts are sometimes only obliquely confronted, but the torrid past of covered-up wars palpably echoes through the scarred yet majestic landscapes.

It ascribes to the falsehood that a rarefied milieu inherently infuses a film with intelligence, as if inept execution can be covered up by pretty lensing.

It most potently strikes the tone of an elegy, pensively observing that beneath the bickering in museum boardrooms lies a massive treasure trove of art history that's being kept from the public's eye.

A tale of memory and redemption that does little to linger in the mind and even less to decry P.L. Travers's claim that Disney turns everything it touches into schmaltz.

Nothing more than an absurdist soap-opera bauble.

An egregious entry into the pantheon of films about white Americans traveling to exotic lands in search of identity and soul-searching adventure.

It functions under the delusion that subtext will magically appear if you linger on a character long enough, and the significance of most of its scenes is nothing if not inscrutable.

Paramount to molding a narrative of war and totalitarianism, however, is the inventive aesthetic in which Panh frames his memoir: a hypnotic hybrid of bleak archival footage, thoughtful voiceover, tone-dictating music, and—most significantly—homemade clay-figurine dioramas.

Treva Wurmfeld's documentary addresses, and acutely analyzes, the way friendship can bend, and occasionally snap, over time.

Candy-colored to a potentially cavity-causing degree, the film is a bubbly regurgitation of retrograde romantic comedy tropes and reactionary sexual politics.

The film's highly calculated beauty suffocates rather than elevates the story's emotional underpinnings.

Chad Crawford Kinkle impressively imbues this supernatural world of backwoods mysticism with a plausible milieu while still staying committed to the film's own brewing insanity.