The French director's follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, The Artist, is everything The Artist was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 12, 2015

Young Hadji's silence gives The Search what lasting power it possesses.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 12, 2015

After winning the Oscar for his glorified trinket The Artist, Hazanavicius throws a spotlight on human rights horrors. His well-intentioned children-in-peril story, set during the second Chechen war, is periodically moving but unwieldy and heavy-handed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 12, 2015

An immense (two hours and 29 minutes) and gravely serious film tackling the humanitarian disaster of the Second Chechen War of 1999-2000.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 23, 2014

The Search is a lecture. As laudable as the film is in many ways, I'm glad I'll never have to sit through it again.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 22, 2014

Hazanavicius has confused sobriety with impact, and mulched down all the stories you might want to tell about Chechnya into a generic, undermotivated wallow.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 21, 2014

It can't help but feel slightly hubristic - and a sad waste of an opportunity for all involved.

Full Review | May 21, 2014

Oscar winner Michel Hazanavicius makes a 180-degree shift from the effervescent charms of 'The Artist' with this grueling, lumbering and didactic war picture.

| May 21, 2014

The Search is a film with sincerity and commitment, and an earnest rejection of the horror of war. But sentimentality is at its core.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 21, 2014

Michel Hazanavicius's straw man conception of the Russians as brutal homophobes is hammered away at with an emphasis that's questionable at best.

| May 21, 2014