Nick McCarthy

The film, with its dark-blue-hued cinematography and murky music, is all foreboding atmosphere.

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.