Chris Packham

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.