Brian Tallerico

If it falls victim to a bit too many college film student clichés, it’s easy to forgive Meyerhoff due to the great performance she draws from her talented young star and what this film means for her bright future.

It is both light as a feather and emotionally resonant. It is defiantly episodic and yet has a cumulative power in its storytelling. It is both airy and emotionally lived-in at the same time.

It is filled with the luscious, beautiful 2D animation that we’ve come to expect from Ghibli, and if the storytelling sometimes gets a bit lethargic for its own good, we’re more forgiving just to have one final dance in the moonlight.

There are a few decent performances, a nice riff on the technology fears that drove the original movie, and a centerpiece of horror that works, but never once do you get the feeling that the people behind this remake are here because of artistic passion or creative drive.

What went wrong? How did so many talented people devote their time and energy to a film that came out this generic, dull, and flat?

To be fair, the slow burn does eventually catch fire and there’s lots of screaming and heavy breathing and dark tunnels and running and what-not. The relatively tense final half-hour is clearly the reason that very smart producer Jason Blum thought this would be a solid follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” It’s that first hour that is the reason it took six years to (barely) get released.

From its very first scenes, Fury Road vibrates with the energy of a veteran filmmaker working at the top of his game, pushing us forward without the cheap special effects or paper-thin characters that have so often defined the modern summer blockbuster.

Only the really strong cast, including great chemistry between the leads, keeps Playing It Cool from totally derailing.

A well-intentioned disaster, only slightly redeemed by a committed performance by Sean Bean, whose talent proves nowhere near enough to make this manipulative tripe more digestible.

It is a true peek into the life of a private superstar. How did he become a rock icon? How did he turn his childhood pain into art? How did his emotional demons overtake him? These are much more difficult questions for a filmmaker to answer than “Nirvana vs. Pearl Jam” or other such garbage of the traditional rock doc.

The bad news is that it still doesn’t quite work, largely because Gosling has bitten off more than he can chew, assembling ideas and images without the directorial vision to connect them.

Black Souls isn’t quite the great film the international cinema buzz machine has touted it to be in some circles, but it is a very good one, the kind that ends with such gravity that you feel its weight for a while after.

Ned Rifle, the final chapter in a strange trilogy with “Henry Fool” and “Fay Grim”, is a movie about damaged people coming to terms with their damage by turning to others. And it’s Hal Hartley’s best movie in years.

From the beginning, Cut Bank isn’t just tonally inconsistent, it doesn’t really have one. It’s flat. There’s no sense of rhythm, tension, or atmosphere.

It’s tightly directed and well-performed, particularly by Columbus Short and a career-redefining turn from Wilmer Valderrama. If anything — and trust me when I tell you this is the opposite of most independently produced noirs from debut directors — there’s an overabundance of ideas in The Girl is in Trouble, sometimes to a distracting degree.

Nightlight is a perfect example of a film with interesting ideas that are totally smothered by poor execution.

It’s a film that seems to have no further point than to remind us that some powerful jerks were once powerful jerk kids. Point taken, but it’s not cinematically satisfying.

It’s a flat-out disaster, the kind of film that its cast and crew hope gets buried as quickly as possible as they race to move on to other projects.

Gibney crams as much material as possible into a quick two hours (he really knows how to edit and pace a piece like this one as it feels much shorter) and yet, to be fair, there’s still an angle missing just by virtue of the fact that he couldn’t get anyone from the Church of Scientology today on camera.

The Cobbler is almost fascinatingly awful enough to recommend. If one subscribes to the theory that you can learn as much from a bad movie as from a good one, this one’s a master class in what not to do.

Run All Night is proof that quality action films don’t really need to reinvent the wheel each time out as long as they make it spin this smoothly.

The rare documentary that gets more and more interesting as it goes along, even ending with an update on this still-unfolding story that just took place.

Under Potrykus’ clever direction and with a striking performance from Joshua Burge, Marty goes from quirky to desperate to dangerous gradually and effectively. He’s not a character to be taken lightly, or quickly forgotten.

I walked away from My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn having enjoyed the time spent with Refn, his family, and Ryan Gosling, but without any further insight into the production of “Only God Forgives,” filmmaking in general or this particular talent.

It is an infuriating reality that The Hunting Ground exposes. I was rattled watching it, finding it hard to catch my breath and harder still to imagine how many people are in positions of power who have heard these stories so many times and turned their backs on victims.

Ultimately, the success of Wyrmwood comes down to confidence. Roache-Turner is like the mad doctor in the film itself, experimenting with his genre with a dance in his step and a maniacal smile.

I’ve always liked Reynolds for the most part, but he does his best work yet here in Satrapi’s odd, pitch-black comedy about a man who talks to his dog and cat. And they talk back.

Some will dismiss it by saying it’s so ineffective as to never really aggravate critical faculties, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a complete waste of time and talent as well.

There are few surprises here after the narrative’s turn to survival horror as the film plods to its inevitable conclusion, and even that final shot feels unearned.

It’s one of those inspirational Hollywood dramas about which there isn’t anything "overtly wrong" with it. It’s well-cast, it looks great, it has that intense centerpiece in the raft, and it certainly conveys a true story worth telling. And yet I keep coming back to that beautiful sunrise that opens the film. It’s just too damn pretty.

The moments of believability in the surprisingly entertaining Life Partners have greater resonance.

It features career-best work by Long and Rossum, both eagerly devouring Esmail’s witty script. Yes, some of it is overwritten and a bit too clever for its own good, but more often it’s an engaging character piece.

If you’re not enraptured with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and the rest of the artists at Ghibli, it may not be precisely what you’re looking for, but Sanada captures something poetic about art and creativity that could speak to anyone, animation fan or otherwise.

Morris & Anders, who also directed, literally repeat many of the same set-ups and punchlines from the original “Bosses,” only more crassly this time and with more discussion of bodily fluids. And nothing is quite as cinematically desperate as someone telling you a joke you’ve already heard only louder.

Damici gives his memorable protagonist enough life to hold it together more often that it would have otherwise. He’s great here. The movie around him, not so much.

There was little reason to expect such a horrendous drop in quality as there is to “Viral,” a film that contains some of the sloppiest, most ineffective filmmaking I’ve seen all year.

It’s a confident, engaging film, undone by some narrative sag in the middle but worth seeing for its opening and closing acts.

Open Windows goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value high.

Before I Go to Sleep is a movie with nothing to hold on to but a paper-thin mystery with really only one of two possible suspects in the end.

It may not be his worst film overall, but Stonehearst is Anderson’s flattest film, a disappointingly shallow affair that wastes an opportunity to breathe life into a timeless Edgar Allen Poe short story.

Typically, when Araki misses the mark, he misses wildly and with fascinating aplomb. White Bird, despite the best efforts of stars Shailene Woodley and Eva Green, is flat when it should be edged; something I never thought I’d say about the man who made a movie called “Totally Fucked Up.”

Whiplash is cinematic adrenalin. In an era when so many films feel more refined by focus groups or marketing managers, it is a deeply personal and vibrantly alive drama.

St. Vincent is a piece of very well-made cheese, a movie in which one can feel its manipulations and heart-string pulling, but the talented ensemble makes those critical talking points easy to dismiss.

The best elements of the documentary Harmontown capture the unique raw energy of Harmon.

Flat is the kindest way to describe A Good Marriage, a King novella turned feature that could have worked as a short or an episode of “Masters of Horror” but truly tests viewer patience at 102 minutes. It’s arguably the dullest King film yet, despite solid work by LaPaglia to save it and a decent set-up that goes absolutely nowhere.

It offers surface level scares without the undercurrent of humanity needed to make them register.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Life’s a Breeze is something of a jumble. There’s a whimsical score that sounds like a Mumford & Sons bridge on repeat that underlines the quirky tone in rather annoying ways.

The Scribbler never clicks into the escapist mind f**k it really needed to be to work. It can't maintain its style and never finds its substance.

Hicks avoids the traditional bio-doc route by turning Keep On Keepin’ On into more than just CT’s story, chronicling how the legendary musician continues to inspire young artists to this day.

Demoustier is a charming young actress. And there are clearly interesting ideas taking flight here. It’s the execution of the flight plan that keeps them from reaching their destination.

I wish the film withheld more information from its audience to raise the overall tension but it’s a solid genre pic, made so primarily by two entirely committed performances from its talented leads.

Yoshiura’s film resonates with the fantastic visions that we’ve come to hope for in the best Japanese animation. When the flat character design, two-dimensional villains, and unengaging narrative counter-act that, it falls flat. Like its two lead characters, it is of two worlds.

Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland beige in the mostly straight-to-video The Calling, a piece that almost miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland.

Starred Up is HEAVY with slang and accents. You won’t understand a third of it. But there’s so much going on in between the lines of dialogue that you won’t care.

The Possession of Michael King becomes one of the most plodding, dull exercises in horror in a very long time. The most horrific moment for this viewer came when I checked the time on my screener to realize it was only about half over.

The final act of Coldwater is horrendously misguided, the kind of insincere melodrama that erases the memory of what came before. It’s a particular shame because there’s an hour of decent filmmaking here.

A film that is always interesting, largely thanks to an entirely committed cast and a writer willing to play with themes like a band improvising until it finds the right tune. There are a few off-key notes but the melody finally comes together.

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

"Cloudy 2" is undeniably dense with ideas, images, and characters but slight on anything of thematic interest at all.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

The three entirely committed, fearless performers put through the physical and emotional motions by Kim carry a film that is the definition of “not for everyone” but Moebius works on its terms. Its twisted, Oedipal, sadomasochistic, castrated terms.

When does a bad, cheap horror movie becomes something more offensively horrible? When it pegs its generic nonsense on real-life tragedy and becomes exploitation. Ben Ketai’s Beneath, not to be confused with the Larry Fessenden film of the same name from last year, is the kind of mediocrity one finds on The Movie Channel on a Saturday night and pretty easily dismisses.

Corbijn keeps the action of A Most Wanted Man at arms length or greater, never finding the heart of the piece despite mostly solid performances and strong production values.

As Cannibal progresses it becomes both more traditional in its narrative and frustrating in its lack of depth.

Overall, Okiura stays very focused on Momo’s emotional journey, which is smart. It’s not as fantastical as “Spirited Away” or many other films about children who encounter the supernatural upon being forced to deal with death, as Momo always stays front and center. The final moments of her journey out of despair are powerfully emotional.

A missed opportunity; a documentary that plays too much like fan service, ignoring actual insight or even detailed history of its chosen subject in favor of unapologetic adoration.

It is a film that can sometimes frustrate in its supporting characters but Cahill and his talented cast are unapologetically willing to explore the kind of complex intangibles that filmmakers often ignore or merely turn into pretentious drivel.

There are moments of tenderness and honest human emotion buried in the frustrating A Long Way Down but one has to work far too hard and give far too much credit to the over-qualified cast to grab at them.

Merely being violent and unpredictable does not make a film like Jackpot funny. Therein lies the biggest problem here.

Pure evil meets unshakable faith in Katrin Gebbe's torturous Nothing Bad Can Happen, a film that begins as a meditation on human behavior and belief but crosses the line into pure sadism.

Aaron Swartz’s story should make you furious. In an era when real criminals of our financial crisis ride limousines to dine with the President, our government overzealously tried to put a man behind bars for decades because he tried to better the world.

Obviously, the situations of A Picture of You feel a bit forced but they’re handled in such a likable way that it’s forgivable, especially in the superior second half of the film.

There’s enough interesting, raw material in Ivory Tower to consider but one wishes it was shaped into something more cohesive and pointed in its attack and approach.

A bleak, brutal film; at times, its monotony can be draining.

The Case Against 8 beautifully reminds us of the human beings who opened up their lives to the world and became representatives for one of the most important movements for equal rights this country has ever seen.

What is scarier than an unexplainable, unidentifiable sound in the pitch-black woods, miles from civilization? Willow Creek makes the case that the answer is nothing.

Borgman can sometimes frustrate but it is an accomplished piece of work, driven by a uniquely malevolent tonal balance and two fantastic central performances. It sometimes simmers when I wish it would boil over but damn if it isn’t fascinating to watch the water bubble.

The array of TV veterans assembled for the film don’t necessarily do anything wrong, and their charisma sometimes translates from small screen to big, but, as is so often the case with the indie dramedy, an unrealistic script lets down a talented cast.

Night Moves eschews traditional tension-building through plot twists and betrayals to focus on its characters, as Reichardt uses her increasingly impressive sense of composition and intuitive pacing to slow burn the audience into a state of anxiety instead of manipulatively pushing them there.

Almost approaches so-bad-you-need-to-see-it categorization.

This is a flat, boring affair.

At its best not in its scenes of men acting like children or the beats that feel more written than organic but in its most believable scenes of joyful, male friendship in between the broad humor and melodrama. I just wish there were more of them.

Parker has made a tough, brutal, and often riveting thriller.

As easy as it is to like Hank and Asha, it’s impossible to look past the many screenwriting and filmmaking flaws of the film about them.

Oculus eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away.

All of these interesting performers can't save a dull script. To work, Draft Day needs the kind of witty dialogue and snappy energy that Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin brought to “Moneyball” but the screenwriters mistake constant activity for actual screenwriting.

She was a true talent. And yet Maloof and Siskel’s film presents an interesting moral quandary along with its profile of an amazing photographer. When does creative ability and the desire to share a true artist’s eye trump what has to be considered an invasion of privacy?

When you reach the critical point that you consider that Trejo, the star of such gems as “Zombie Hunter” and “Dead in Tombstone”, to be above this material, you know you’re in a rare category of awful.

This is a story that still resonates in the way we deal with war, torture, and detainment camps. It demands depth.

What elevates Hide Your Smiling Faces is Carbone's gentle, lyrical touch where other filmmakers would have turned the same thematic concerns into melodrama.

The most significant and bizarre problem with Muppets Most Wanted is a lack of a protagonist.

This is a solid thrill ride all around, especially for those who like their Faustian parables with a bit of the bloody red stuff.

The living legend certainly deserves little blame for this misfire but she can't handle the heavy lifting required by a script and director that feel as unfocused as the film's protagonist for at least an hour.

And yet it's impossible to deny that what Special ID does well it does extremely well.

Odd Thomas becomes a film that's going through the motions with too little character, style, or atmosphere to keep it engaging.

Stritch is a documentary subject as fearless and raw as her stage persona.

The movie is more stunning than ever, a daring blend of history and personal storytelling with one of the most striking performances of its era from Leslie Cheung, a performer who left us way too soon.

Lake of Death is a slow burn that fizzles out under the weight of its influences. The tech elements are significantly better than average B-movie fare, but the writing never matches them.

The kind of meandering apathy that Reichardt is going for in River of Grass can be tough to connect to as a viewer, and it’s interesting that her films became more resonant when they switched from what is kind of a comedy to drama.