Chris Packham

Director Finn Taylor’s Unleashed is an inoffensive Hallmark card of an indie comedy, as indifferently intended by the sender as it is regarded by the recipient.

The film works marginally well as the story of a broken family trying to heal itself, but the third act is a whole different movie.

Director Kiley is mostly successful at keeping Hallmark banalities at bay, relating Cora's crime in a series of tense flashbacks, and populating the film with funny characters played by a top-notch cast.

Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.

Bad Milo! meets your expectations right where you left them.

There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. But when they talk about their alienated childhoods, broken families, and absent fathers, it's pretty clear why their cinematic role model was so meaningful.

Though it includes parts of a live comedy performance, the film is a documentary with an attention span about as long as its subject's.

Most of The Search for General Tso is a breezy survey of the history of Chinese-American cuisine.

Akinnagbe's embodiment of Jack is the most wholly realized accomplishment in the film. His speech, hesitant and stammering, is matched by defensive body language, his walk and posture as guarded and wary as a bird's. It's a truly physical performance in a film that didn't demand it.

Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.

Toller's film is narrated entirely by Fields via a series of lengthy recorded interviews that unwind jerkily, like a misshapen bolt of yarn over hundreds of still photos, Super-8 footage, and hand-drawn animations.

With The Hangover Part III, director Todd Phillips continues to occupy an apt (and very lucrative) niche, casting rich, entitled fraternity dicks as underdog heroes beset by shrewish women, foreigners with funny accents, and even animals-often cute animals with big, dewy eyes.

And this is the film's buried lede: Hakeem busts her ass for the candidate while Barr conducts her entire campaign from her house via Skype.

Chinese and Italian cuisines in America recall the traditions of homelands to which their practitioners can return. Not so with the Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe that inform delicatessens; those communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. This is one of the themes of Deli Man.

Berkeley includes some of the writer's unpleasant moments on the tour. But what Harmon wants, as any Community fan knows, is real connection with other human beings.

What's remarkable is that despite the sweaty overdetermination of the film's dude-bro interactions and the whole prefabricated concept of performance air sex, the love story has actual depth and sadness.

The film’s breezy drive and bursts of comic energy largely divert attention from the flatness of its world and characters.

The comic plot of Fonzy is outrageous, but to writer-director Isabelle Doval, it's just an armature that supports its gently funny characters and its themes of emotional and filial connections.

Lynskey is a luminous counterpoint to Phillips's energetic earthiness, but they can't lift a story with so much killjoy ballast.

Co-directors Jean-François Pouliot and François Brisson progressively heighten the scale of the battles, but the emotional tenor is pitched at innocence and fun. The filmmakers attempt a transition toward a more bitter rivalry, but they just don't have the heart to make this children's war ugly.

The film shoehorns Potts's life story into a familiar underdog template, populating the world with near-mythological threshold guardians who exist to assure the hero that he isn't good enough.

The script veers from comic, narrated episodes to surprising violence, planting early narrative seeds that yield some effective surprises later, a dynamic range that's pretty comfortable to old hands Travolta and Travolta's Chili Palmer wig after all these years.

The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.

Franco adapted a book that often reads like joyless homework into a film that feels the same way.

The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.

The film’s hidden asset is the luminous Mary Steenburgen, funny and gorgeous as an empty-nest mom turned lounge chanteuse who beguiles the dudes with age-appropriate flirting and arch humor.

Khalfoun makes the audience privy to Frank's memories, migraines, and jarring hallucinations of his mother's recalled abuses.

It looks like the recruitment appeal that it is; it will probably be pretty effective on campuses.

A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.

It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.

Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty and a genuine talent for communicating humanity’s scale against immense natural forces and the absolute howling vastness of time.

A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.

Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.

It's often funny, and the writers are smart, but the film is like an arcless, extended episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Besides the narrative reversal, Montgomery is the only interesting part of the film — smart, obstinate, and ambitious. The gross-out scenes and raunchy banter between the film's sex workers are funny, but its world is pretty small and unsurprising.

It’s strongly anti-prohibition, and the film’s structure favors that bias.

Automata has moments of tremendous visual and storytelling elegance which are punctuated with ham-fisted characterization and thunderingly terrible acting.

Good-natured and completely forgettable.

Posehn, flaunting his insulin-resistant physique and middle-aged dong, is the perfect counterpoint to the wretched American Beauty, providing a way more accurate portrayal of midlife creepiness.

Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.

Stylishly filmed and often scary, Out of the Dark unspools a conclusion as conventional and button-down as a wide tie knot and a pair of wingtips.

Peter Wingfield delivers an engagingly oily Claudius, and Lara Gilchrist's Ophelia is radiant. But Ramsay's Hamlet's madness never really overcomes the character's traditional emo temperament.

The man who might be Robertson is both the point and the best part of the film. He comes across as sincere, his childlike vulnerability and the depiction of his life in Vietnam demanding sympathy.