Chris Packham

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.

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.