Chris Klimek

There’s a certain undeniable gravity to John’s tragic arc. But Dawn Patrol feels distended and awkwardly paced despite a lean, 87-minute runtime.

Ariely’s inquiries into how and why we stretch, reframe, or ignore entirely the truth are certainly eye-opening, but he and Melamede are better at demonstrating the ubiquity of subterfuge than prescribing remedies for it.

There’s a lot going on in this movie. But all that texture turns out to be a virtue.

Bauckman and Belliveau don’t connect their observation of Scott to a larger idea, and their interest never seems rooted in anything more empathetic than morbid curiosity.

At least Outcast’s rustic sets and costumes look lived-in and real.

Though it strives mightily to compete in every category, it’s not as funny as Guardians, as awe-inspiring as Interstellar, as thrilling as Edge Of Tomorrow, or as provocative as Under The Skin.

Supremacy is a well-acted, abysmally written, deeply unpleasant exercise that pays no dividends of insight (or heaven forfend, amusement) for the chore of enduring its endless racial epithets and handheld shots of gun barrels in faces.

It works, mostly, thanks to Helberg’s committed, vanity-free performance, and to the bubbly chemistry between him and the luminous Melanie Lynskey as Devon, his first and only love.

Greg Francis’ writing and directing feature debut plays like a thoroughly mundane mashup of grim David Ayer cop movies like Training Day, neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects, and green-tinted, subterranean torture flicks like Saw for long enough that when Francis turns out to have an ace up his sleeve, it’s a genuine surprise. Not enough to put the movie into the black, but enough to mark him as a talent to watch.

Reach Me wants to be masterpiece, but it’s a finger painting. By Captain Hook.

This feature directing debut from X-Men, X2, and Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter is basically a bloodier, drastically more hirsute remake of Footloose set in the sleepy Canadian tax haven of Lupine Ridge, where most of the residents are actually… well, if you guessed “vampires,” you’re close.

This movie is so colorless, odorless, and (especially) tasteless, so devoid of mass or substance, that it’s easy to forget even while it’s still playing.

Will Bakke’s Believe Me is a textbook lesson in how glossy cinematography and an appealing cast can compensate for an undercooked script.

It isn’t a documentarian’s job, necessarily, to prescribe remedies for the social problems she reports. But de Mare and Kelly never get as far as framing the scope of the problem in any real way.

He seems like one of the least neurotic men on the planet, and yet how could that describe someone who lived with a heavy secret for 68 years? That’s the question Kroot’s film circles without ever managing completely to ask, much less fully answer.

It’s so high on the thrill of discovery that it might even win over people who can’t stand the guy.

[Andrews] and screenwriter Jake Wade Wall seem fully aware of the long line of icky horror comedies that precede theirs, but their attempt isn’t scary enough for homage or funny enough for satire.

The sumptuous production values and stirring performances that make the equally brutal Game Of Thrones so irresistible are nowhere in evidence in Battle For Blood, which has all of Thrones’ savagery, but none of its mystery.

Sex Tape is warmer and more amusing than its ads would lead one to believe. In fact, it’s almost good enough, leaning a little too hard on the innate likability of stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel.

This is an accessible, briskly paced documentary about a phenomenon that warrants exactly the level of investigation Hodges has given it here.

Nothing is revealing or surprising in this horse-beating tale of spiritual poverty among the extremely wealthy. It’s uninvolving enough to make Ayn Rand herself beg for a bailout.

Code Black doesn’t suggest ways to improve health care in America, but it at least documents one of the most noble and necessary professions with insight and humility.

The performances, particularly from Towne and Tighe, go a long way toward making the story’s improbabilities seem trivial.

On your mark, get set, go find something else to watch! Because The Human Race, a dreary, smeary, low-low-budget but even lower-inspiration horror flick from British writer-director Paul Hough, is likely to leave viewers rueing the craven, disappointing species into which they were, through no fault of their own, born.

An important film despite some baffling presentational choices.

Hertz hasn't framed his subjects' stories into a singular, compelling narrative.

This is an almost scene-for-scene remake — but not a shot-for-shot remake, which likely would have been more enjoyable.

It’s clearly more interested in dissecting these characters than in solving the mystery of Matthew’s disappearance. That’s the advantage of casting actors like Collette and Church, who can lure viewers into a confident familiarity, then reveal something deeper.

With his thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, disquietingly symmetrical face, Mikkelsen is nearly as good a prop as he is an actor. That impassive but selectively expressive mug is what makes Age Of Uprising’s climax shocking and memorable, but not at all in the way viewers will be conditioned to expect.

Thompson and Brosnan really are fine romantic foils. They deserve a better movie to trade barbs in. They deserve better barbs to trade.

Director Emilio Aragón doesn’t want to choose a consistent tone any more than a bucking bronco wants a rider on its back, but he’s prodded along by another fine, scabrous performance from octogenarian Robert Duvall as Red.

A smart, sardonic, unpredictable morality play that gets the little things right.

Foulkes’ long-simmering anger over having not received his due doesn’t endear him to the art-world power brokers best positioned to help him, but it does make him an uncommonly forthcoming, unguarded interview.

Decoding Annie Parker is a better living-with-disease drama than medical mystery.

Like so many late-night journeys, Last Passenger starts out full of promise, but only stops at places we’ve already been.

It’s a credit to Stockwell’s engrossing (though slightly schizophrenic) movie that it engenders sufficient curiosity to inspire viewers into seeking out non-fictional accounts of the story.

It’s clunky, it’s hokey, it was clearly made on the cheap. It’s also ambitious in a way that more expensive films are rarely allowed to be anymore.

A deeply dopey, distinctly not-terrifying, unintentionally hilarious supernatural thriller.

This is the disreputable, even disgusting diversion the Expendables pictures should've been.

A ponderous, self-important character study swimming with red herrings.

Exposed is really just a series of intermingling profiles, which is perhaps why its observations eventually begin to feel slightly repetitive.

Director Joe Pearson (who also has a mysterious “created by” credit) and screenwriter David Abramowitz have ginned up a fan-fiction-y premise that suggests much more apocalyptic fun than it ultimately delivers.

Kent’s photography is so energetic, and the soundtrack is so sprightly—it features jagged tunes from beloved cult act The Feelies, as well as other, less familiar indie bands—that the thinness of the characterization slips by almost unnoticed.

Rarely has a life beyond the law seemed less enticing than it does in Babak Najafi’s bleak crime picture. It’s unrelentingly intense and utterly humorless, but there’s no denying the skill and brio with which it unspools.

Forsman — whose loose inspiration was Snowblind, a 1976 memoir by his retired drug-smuggler father — brings a refreshing crispness to the foot chases and fights, and there's a fun cameo that supports the retro-'80s vibe nicely.

Habie’s fractured narrative style—particularly her arbitrary shifts from Khaled’s perspective to Eyal’s to (apparently) third-person reality—stymies the accumulation of any dramatic momentum from scene to scene.

Baseline competence elevates The Outsider, just barely, into the realm of perfect forgetability.

While some of the workers' chitchat is translated via subtitles, long passages of it are not. Oreck's imagery of the forbidding Arctic landscape through its seasonal transformations (the movie covers roughly a year) is eloquent enough.

All his film can do to make its case for Sosa's significance is trot out subjects who compare her to Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and, most puzzlingly, "Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney in one," without elaboration.

Unacceptable Levels wants to scare the biosolids out of you, and it can, but that doesn't mean it's a success.

It's an absorbing document of an extraordinary act of generosity.

It's a bummer that the movie settles for such an oft-mined vein of bummed-outedness—for a few minutes, Coiro really had me going.