Barbara VanDenburgh

Point and Shoot is a fascinating, frequently frustrating documentary.

As an exegesis on tortured creative genius, Harmontown proves wanting. It's in the exploration of how "Community" fandom formed its own distinctive community of outcasts that the film excels.

You'd learn a lot more if you went out and, well, actually met a Mormon.

Aside from Dance and some hazy views of impaled bodies, the film is low on shock and gore. It's aiming more for sweeping historical epic, but it doesn't work on either level.

How disappointing that a movie about challenging authority should be such a slave to convention.

The Zero Theorem feels like Gilliam's keen intellect chasing its own tail.

It's adorable. It's also very thin. There's a disconcerting literalism to the songs' dramatic representation that chokes the drama.

Life lessons are learned, children do some growing up, nothing too terribly upsetting happens, and the corniness is, mostly, kept to tolerable levels.

The film really pops to life only when it gets a little messy, and it's never messier than when it loses itself in family dynamics.

Mostly, it's fine. The acting is fine. The writing is fine. The story is fine. There are a few laughs. And that should be fine enough. But with material as rich as Leonard's serving as the foundation, just fine is a disappointment.

Nothing fresh is being brought to the table, but it's a sufficient bit of fun for anyone who longs for the days of Brosnan's spy swagger.

The brutally sparse documentary Rich Hill removes poverty from the realm of the abstract and makes it personal.

There's a purity to the experience of watching a film so naturalistic, like living in someone else's life for two hours.

The film is less effective, and less focused, when it switches into activism mode. Not that its heart isn't in the right place — we all know about the appalling state of institutionalized elder care. Which is the problem with those segments: We all know this already, and the filmmaking feels like perfunctory, necessary padding.

There's a welcome lack of pretension to the proceedings. Stalwarts like Hurt and Ian McShane are on hand to class up the joint — everyone's got a British accent except for Johnson — while the predictable story bludgeons its way towards an inevitable conclusion.

There's nothing surprising or fresh about these people, their problems or their pairing, each character fitting snugly into his or her familiar archetype.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

The found-footage approach loses its shine quickly.

The film ricochets between Tammy being an oblivious cartoon goblin and a textured, sympathetic human being who just wants to be loved. Perhaps if the film had catered a little less to McCarthy's comedic gifts — the curse-word fugue states, the slapstick humor, the non sequiturs — the end result would have felt more balanced and rewarding.

Violette doesn't abandon that playbook, but it does a better job than most of putting the viewer in its artist's headspace.

It's the PG-13 version of "The Hangover," and more than anything, that's just boring.

It's a well-written rom-com with rascally charm, a modest story of an awkward Brooklyn girl making a go of life. It's irreverent and rough around the edges with an imperfect protagonist, blue language, scatological humor and rambling confessional stand-up monologues, sometimes about bodily fluids. The laughs are frequent and ribald.

The script feels structurally inept, building up scenes and characters then cutting them off, never to be revisited. The end result is a film that feels full of staircases that lead nowhere.

The plain facts, presented without commentary, are an effective plea for a more compassionate immigration policy.

Blue Ruin is a movie about revenge, but it reaches far past the bottom-shelf titillations of fantasy to tell a richer, character-driven story with a protagonist who's less avenging angel than ghost.

Dom Hemingway is a naughty good time while it lives up to the unpredictable bawdiness of its opening line.

Particle Fever does an excellent job of laying out what's at stake as it documents the creation and fine-tuning of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

For a film about art forgeries, The Art of the Steal is itself something of a forgery, a painstaking, brushstroke-by-brushstroke re-creation of masterworks dreamed up by better artists. And like a good forgery, it's enjoyable on the surface, but loses its charm a bit once you do some digging.