Chris Packham

Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.

Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.

Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.

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

Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they’re about to die.

Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s gorgeous film is informed by that same charm and intelligence the way a sailboat is informed by 7 knots of westerly breeze.

The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.

Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.

This film is unusually slow-paced for its genre, but Zahler’s screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia is the unscary film’s only source of spookiness.

It’s completely unfair to compare these characters to (say) Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, funny women who derive dignity from their friendship. But that’s a show written, created, and performed by women, while this film’s creative trust is a clueless, retrograde sausage festivus.

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.

Lambert aims for gentle, Lake Wobegon–ish nostalgia, but the jokes never land, the undifferentiated small town confers no sense of location, and its eccentrics aren’t particularly weird.

Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.

Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.

Though Wajda admires this struggle, the artist’s final pursuit never seems redemptive in the depths of Strzemiński’s isolation and misery.

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

Though visually expansive, however, the film feels emotionally intimate.

Rackstraw Downes: A Painter is glacial and mesmerizing, the documentary equivalent of droning Tibetan singing bowls, a work crafted to induce its audience into the same contemplative state as its subject at work.

In this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work, and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews.

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.

The film is wallpapered with beatings, shootings and bloodshed, so its genuine sensitivity to trans issues is welcome and surprising.

Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.

As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance.

Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.

Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.

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.

Burton scales his finale down to the size of a tourist boardwalk for an unexpectedly gripping crowd-pleaser of an action scene.

Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films.

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

The film combines agonizing scenes of didactic earnestness about gun violence with the absolutely soul-crushing ennui of flaccid marriage jokes.

There's nothing new in the friction between these characters, but it's fun to watch a couple of pros showboating on the field, even when the stakes aren't high.

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.

Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.

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.

Allen attempts to build a sense of mounting anxiety via the increasing suspicions of a tenacious insurance investigator, unexpected testimony from eyewitnesses, and Lena's squirrelly behavior, but pop star Jonas is incapable of making simple facial expressions, let alone evincing existential dread.

A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.

The film never reconciles the incongruities of its constituent parts, which hang together like toothpaste and orange juice

Jones presents a stark picture of a bifurcated economic system: the real one, in which ordinary citizens struggle; and the financial economy, in which the livelihoods of citizens are leveraged by the wealthy for speculative bets.

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.

So gosh-darn terrible in so many ways, the film defies a unified thesis.

Writer-director Hank Bedford delivers some tactile, human details.... But the film is slow and often agonizingly predictable.

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.

Though not as funny as Moore's earliest work, Jon Whelan's Stink! is way more emotionally affecting.

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.

Famous for his war photography, McCullin's gift is his sensitivity, a capacity to feel the pain of other people that informs both the images he produced and the ones he refused to take.

Bone Tomahawk is an odd duck, a bowlegged western with slasher influences, a penchant for lengthy conversational meanderings, and a genuine interest in character.

The director's native warmth and sympathy are extended here to the store and the personalities that made it a billion-dollar, globe-bestriding colossus.

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.

Eden wants you to know what people are really like outside your smothering bourgeois cocoon.

The script doesn't know the difference between being something scary and pointing at something scary. It's less a film than a series of imitative gestures, a bunch of horror signifiers pointing to nothing.

Wilson is a charismatic and underused actor, perfect here as a guy with a talent for convincing others of his virtue. Headey, as Sam's wife, creates a surprisingly complex portrait of a woman shattered by her husband but hungry for higher social position.

Allie and Harper are basically unlikable, but played with a light touch and just enough distance from their own unthinking cruelty to remain funny.

Sometimes, Extinction is a zombie apocalypse story; mostly, it's a meditation on isolation, redemption, and family that could, in its basic outline, be satisfyingly told outside of its genre.

In its execution, the film becomes a cascading-failure scenario that proceeds from Soumah's intention to bait-and-switch the audience, coupled with a lot of suboptimal acting and amateurish editing choices.

The film's sweetness, its story line, and the script's cartoony characters recall Raising Arizona, though Gone Doggy Gone isn't as tightly structured. But, being looser, it has a little more room to breathe.

Unlike guilty-pleasure Guy Ritchie crime films, in which vivid characters and unlikely subplots converge in lush visual mayhem, 7 Minutes is humorless and perfunctory, its heavies and protagonists never so much as aspiring to transcend or challenge the stereotypes they represent.

Using a slavery narrative to advance an unrelated agenda is pretty tasteless, bordering on offensive.

A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.

Schiffli and Dastmalchian deliver a sweet, elegiac concluding moment that offers a measure of hope without making a lot of unbelievable promises.

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.

Like many, many films starring Christopher McDonald, the best thing about The Squeeze is Christopher McDonald.

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.

The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter's documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel.

Potrykus and Burge make this transformation — from funny, oddball character study to darker portrayal of desperation — more naturally than it seems should be possible.

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.

The film quietly reveals these four small stories as epically heroic and timeless journeys.

If Napier hadn't shown up with a camera, Uygur would likely have continued filming himself, because his "firebrand" commentary is only ostensibly about politics; it's mostly about projecting the world onto his own ego and making it Cenk Uygur–shaped.

The film unspools with a momentum that mitigates its artless brutality, kinda, but it's a high-pressure firehose of stupid.

Writer-director Stephen Belber's inspiriting, generous Match is so good that it's like some kind of trick.

The film is as vacuous and undeserving of regard as any of its characters.

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

A Little Game is an OK children's movie that can only be appreciated by kids, who have not yet been callused by the awfulness of both chess metaphors and the old ladies in films who are always spouting gauzy generalities about the magic of life.

Love Hunter probably counts as a musical, the film's a sad, gentle valediction for a young artist’s dream.

It's a comedy that's so broad and cartoony that the occasional dramatic pivots seem diminished and ridiculous, like performing a soliloquy on a Chuck E. Cheese stage.

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.

Unstudied to the point of utilitarianism, the film nonetheless has wide scope, and Doyle effectively gets his arms around this huge, nebulous, weird job.

It's a black-comedy plot without any blackness or actual comedy, unless mugging and bro-heiming by Mad TV's Will Sasso counts as hilarious.

The jokes are slow and obvious, and the editor lingers over every one like a sleepy drunk over a basket of tater tots, stoically holding the shot long after any reasonable person would have concluded that a punchline had occurred.

It sacrifices its voice to the premeditated non-style of a first-person pseudo-documentary, a form that often has the paradoxical effect of making everything it shows us seem more fake than usual.

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.

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.

Martemucci intertwines these stories gracefully, and with the charm and charisma of her cast, makes clever banter and script contrivances seem completely natural and unaffected.

Among Ravens wants to be the The Big Chill with Gen-X assholes, a weird ambition.

Premature, you will be exhausted to hear, is a teen sex comedy with the plot of Groundhog Day, its supernatural comedy hearkening more to Scott Baio's Zapped! than to Porky's.

Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz connects the dots of Swartz's past, assembling a vivid portrait of a sensitive genius with a strong moral sense.

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.

The frank honesty of these accounts testifies to the trust Junger and Hetherington cultivated among the Second Platoon in 2008.

Strangely Bechdel Test-failing and as far removed from real life as Middle Earth, Lucky Them nonetheless hits familiar beats in welcome and unexpected ways, and does it by the book.

Emoticon ;), a vanity project written, directed, starring, and sung by Livia De Paolis, is a grown-up's weird idea of how kids behave.