Chris Packham

The script is only lightly didactic and well-paced, and it nods toward the adults in the audience mainly by not insulting their intelligence.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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