Chris Packham

Co-director and narrator Ben Knight interviews activists, officials, social jammers, and scientists, approaching the subject not with outrage, but with humor and optimism.

Fed Up is a workmanlike documentary, as undistinguished in style as a PowerPoint slide show. It nonetheless finds traction in its depiction of the food industry's Montgomery Burns–like practices.

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.

Altered States of Plaine, like indies Pi and Primer, harbors ambition that towers over its super-saver discount budget.

Sincere and unexpectedly good.

Rio 2 wants to be a musical, but instead of timing songs to, say, the emotional peaks of the characters, director Carlos Saldanha opts for high-intensity intervals of singing every four minutes.

Director Jason Naumann treats the characters with genuine affection and a portrayal of faith that actually has integrity.

Small details and incidents accrete into a pointillist rendering of despair.

Mannered and often very funny.

The white saviors are flat, 2D manifestations of virtue... And the film's Indians? They aren't characters at all.

The Art of the Steal doesn't advance the nerdy intertextuality that has distinguished ironic crime films since Guy Ritchie, but writer-director Jonathan Sobol knows the ropes.

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.

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.

Too bad that Urban's stab at black-comedy satire is hobbled by the obviousness of his characters.

Maxine Peake is a revelation in Run & Jump, communicating vitality and extraordinary optimism that practically bleeds out and infects the visuals.

Good-natured and completely forgettable.

Despite the psychological extremes, writer-director Francesca Gregorini presents her characters as recognizably human balls of complexity, nudging but never forcing them toward a sad, beautiful conclusion.

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 dull Adventures of the Penguin King is definitely the laziest of the waddle-coms to win theatrical release.

The narrative hinges at every turn on moments of human connection, scary confrontations other films would resolve with violence finding unexpected (and probably unlikely) detours into humor and empathy.

A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.

There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.

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.

Sometimes academically clinical, and including infomercial-like narration by Jane Seymour, the film has a bright core of real emotion.

The episodic story and minimal budget result in a small canvas over which these two huge characters dominate.

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.

With its fun script and cheap visuals, Escape Plan evokes the halfwit cheesiness of 1980s-era Cannon films, but it also recalls the deft pacing and legibility of their action sequences.

The exhausting and unrelatable Our Day Will Come escalates to a violent rampage as essentially unpleasant and nonsensical as its characters.

Like the Saw franchise, Cassadaga, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, attempts to leverage the horror genre in the service of inducing epiphanies, but keeps tripping over its confused tangle of genres.

[A] quiet, somber film.

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

Through photos and family lore, but mostly through Dayton's own eloquence, Mitchell assembles a biographical portrait that's inspiring in the best possible way.

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

[A] small, gentle coming-of-age story, exceedingly well-cast.

The Secret Lives of Dorks, starring Jim Belushi, is, well, the Jim Belushi of high-school romantic comedies: indifferent, kind of exhausted.

The music is incredible, and through interviews with Rosey Grier, Afrika Bambaataa, Questlove, and a squadron of old-school studio musicians, director Dan Forrer unearths some of the hidden history of American pop.

Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.

The tense prologue of writer-director Bryan Ramirez's Mission Park...evokes a tactile, scary reality utterly betrayed by the following 90-minute string of hackneyed, basic-cable plotting and dialogue.

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.

Unfortunately, the interesting drabness of the afterlife’s police department is paired with the colorless paucity of the film’s heavies...The deados, unmemorable CG brutes, spout generic bad-guy dialogue undistinguished by humor or characterization.

A wide-ranging, if shallow, exploration of intrusive government surveillance practices.

Writer-director Josh Boone populates Stuck in Love with smart characters breaking from emotional holding patterns of varying contours.

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

With its interrogations of gender, feminism, and marriage, Shakespeare's comedy is an apt vehicle for Whedon's own storytelling agenda.

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.

An extraordinarily undistinguished comedy from director Brian Herzlinger.

Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe.

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

The film's intentions are way too good for its own good, producing bloodless romance and more shamefully bloodless carnage.

At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.

This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.

The film is also faithful to the smartassery of the Spider-Man of the comics, and Garfield's spindly physicality evokes the Marvel illustrations of the 1960s.