Peter Goldberg

The film is refreshing for its lack of pearl-clutching, its ambivalence in assessing what it’s like to be a commodity with a will and a nervous system.

Playfully biting as it can be, Tel Aviv on Fire tends to falter when it loses sight of the target of its satire.

The film finds Dónal Foreman exploring the suggestive gaps that exist between his own biography and that of his father.

At its best, the film is a testament to how Ruth Westheimer’s practiced decency was literally a saving grace during the Reagan era.

With the film, Harmony Korine solidifies his position as the premier cartographer of the Sunshine State as a place of unhurried pursuits.

Its drawn-out descriptions of culinary traditions and practices are enticing enough, but the same can’t be said about the characterizations.

Single-minded and direct in its execution, the film is a hard look at the extremes of masculine guilt and healing.

While it pays lip service to the fascinating theatrical norms of pro wrestling, the film ends up expending most of its energy on its search for barriers that Paige can break through.

This gender-swapped update of What Women Want doesn’t pass up the opportunity to undercut itself whenever it gets the chance.

Throughout Caniba, there’s a singularly disquieting relationship between the filmmakers’ formal experimentation and their subject.

Even while it asks us to recognize ourselves in a world not too distant from our own, The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.

It's the film's concerted emphasis on Colette's ambivalent nature and desires that reveals her to be an artist just ahead of her time, fighting against, yet seduced by, her present.

Writer-director Augustine Frizzell's film is funny and surprisingly tender, if at times frustratingly uneven.

Although the film never allows itself to be quite so freewheeling as Bozon’s earlier work, and pales as a result, one of its pleasures is how giddily it suggests its characters finding release from the bureaucratic rigmarole in minor though often inane ways.

Atsuko Hirayanagi's feature-length directorial debut offers a surprising take on the tricky art of communication.

This is a film about the adolescent pangs to belong that also mines its tale of magic and malevolence for an imaginative allegory about the excesses of scientific inquiry.

Wang Bing's documentaries are angry, raw testaments to the human spirit in the face of social injustice. In this regard, his latest, the harrowing, soulful Bitter Money, is fortunately no exception.

This is a gruesome art-world fairy tale unafraid to face the bitter details of its hero's tumultuous life.

The film's meditative and excessive sides never quite cohere, giving the impression of watching two distinct films that are jostling against each other, rather than united in a single story.

Throughout, the documentary wavers between a sincere investigation of the avant-garde music group Laibach and self-satire.

Julia Solomonoff's film ripples with a palpable sense of the sheer distance between the down and out actor at its center and his goals.

Peter Bratt's documentary sharply trumpets Dolores Huerta's life and centrality in the turbulent history of social justice since the '60s.

Even its sensitive and gorgeous choreographies can't fully offer respite from the hollow narrative.

The film has such a goofy sense of humor and affection for its premise that its uneven narrative is sometimes only as frustrating as a little static on an old VHS.

The documentary is an insightful portrait of the former American president and the world that he shaped.

The psychological wars that have made the prequels simmer with tightly wound tensions are given their most cutting treatment yet.

The film is always at least gut-rumbling and keeps its humor in situations that are morose and awkward.

Maud Lewis herself couldn’t paint a hurricane that would blow the film’s overburdened narrative off course.