Andrew Barker

So fatally frontloaded with endless training montages, awfully written, indifferently acted drama, sports-film platitudes and jaw-dropping product placements that only the hardiest of viewers will make it through to the payoff.

Curiously airless, weightless and tonally uncertain, the picture mixes mass murder, dismemberment and rape threats with sappy sentimentality, fish-out-of-water gags and groan-worthy meta-humor, yet very little of it manages to leave any impression.

It’s difficult to get past the film’s restless, ill-fittingly bombastic style.

The film’s central fivesome prove charming pallbearers throughout the film, which alternates between inspired and insipid as it hits its hagiographic marks.

Full of warmth and refreshingly matter-of-fact sexuality, the film has its heart in the right place, yet it’s ultimately a bit blander than its subject matter ought to demand, and its chamber-piece intimacy and pileup of coincidences scan particularly awkwardly given its convincingly wide-open depiction of New York.

The picture is still much too rickety, slapdash and surprisingly dull to qualify as a good barrel-bottom pleasure.

Vivid photography, true-to-life moments and a wonderful lead performance compensate for some first-timer missteps in debutante writer-director Dee Rees' Pariah.

An exquisite, beautifully acted gem of a film, one that should serve as a prelude to bigger things for stars Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, as well as director Drake Doremus.

Pummeling, overlong, and at times a bit too proud of its own provocations, Bodied is nonetheless a feverishly entertaining spectacle, and Kahn’s willingness to put every liberal piety on the Summer Jam screen proves intoxicating.

Skate Kitchen has plenty to say about the lengths to which young women must go to clear out a little breathing room in testosterone-heavy spaces, but it is first and foremost an irresistible hangout movie.

Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.