Chuck Wilson

In their feature debut, co-writers/directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren and co-writers Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olavi Rantala reach for absurdist comedy — the reindeer-blood accident, the projectile-vomit bit, the grave-robbing incident — with a touch so light that the general nuttiness comes to seem a central (and essential) component of Finnish rural life.

A Prayer Before Dawn feels scarily authentic, and may be too much for some. But there are moments of grace amid the setting’s despair.

A Quiet Place is full of fabulous, virtuoso action set pieces, but mere hours after seeing it, what I’m already flashing on the most are the ways in which each member of this family, children and adults alike, tries to carry the weight of their central burden, which isn’t fear and dread, but guilt and grief, two monsters no third act plot twist can ever quite vanquish.

The Strangers: Prey at Night, co-written by Bertino and Ben Ketai and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) has a slow and rather grim first half, but then, in the home stretch, takes a welcome turn into the seriously silly.

Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due.

Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.

The film is jammed with incident and detail but there’s little flow to the storytelling.

Both a thriller and meditation on the loss of innocence, Super Dark Times is rich with the minutiae of a bygone era...but Phillips and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski press hard against the instinct for nostalgia.

Unlocked feels like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, which makes it a perfect fit for the 76-year-old Apted, whose wonderfully varied career includes the James Bond flick, The World Is Not Enough.

Cox’s delivery of Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” D-Day speech surely ranks among the best, but it’s a problem when a narrative feature’s most powerful scenes are drawn from historical text.

The film gains power in the final third...one wishes Thompson had chosen to view the great artist's lives through the eyes of the women who loved (and tolerated) them

The need to tell a story and the desire not to collide in Live Cargo, the narratively uneven but visually exquisite debut feature from writer-director Logan Sandler.

[A] slightly uneven yet deeply affecting documentary.

Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.

A last-minute flurry of action and a final plot twist aren't enough to redeem this busy but tedious thriller.

A bit disjointed but also vibrant and loving.

Writer-director Musa Syeed has conjured a drama rich with incident...but most of the turns of plot feel organic, ours to discover, as long as we're paying attention.

Scimé and Adkins have real chemistry, but the script is forever cutting back to quirky, talkative Katie, and any chance of exploring the complexities of a relationship between two men, one of whom is intractable, is lost.

[A] hokey but effective adaptation.

[A] superb coming-of-age drama.

In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways.

You have a movie with everything it needs save one crucial element: emotion.

The road-trip drama Who's Driving Doug is earnest but not overly sweet — a blessing for a film with built-in sentimentality traps.

The new thriller Misconduct is getting kicked to the curb by its distributor, which is too bad, because director Shintaro Shimosawa's debut feature boasts an elegant visual style and a mystery plot with so many absurd twists that the film becomes enjoyable high melodrama.

The co-directing brothers Goetz prove adept at building escape-the-bad-guy action sequences, but they continually run up against the story's Marquis-de-Sade underpinnings.

Krampus, sad to say, is a disappointment. It's alternately funny and intense (don't take the wee ones), but never enough of either to form a cohesive whole.

Led by the honorably dour Firth and the charisma-free Harington, MI-5 is convoluted and dull, though Harry's revenge against that dastardly mole is pleasingly diabolical. But it's too little too late.

An overlong but deeply felt film.

The Russian Woodpecker is very much like Fedor himself — eccentric as hell, smart as a whip, and, at the end of the day, a heartbreaker.

Despite its sci-fi hook, Movement and Location turns out to be a surprisingly resonant film about how impossible it is for most people — no matter their cosmic time zone — to carve out a life that's emotionally honest.

Thanks to Ashton's brilliant, career-defining performance, we're made to see that the only thing worse than doing evil deeds is being nice enough to feel guilty about them.

Hellions is unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.

The virus is spreading, but the filmmakers don't appear fully committed to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, so no sense of dread (or suspense) ever takes hold.

With sleek and informative onscreen graphics and thrilling slow-motion demonstrations of game technique, Top Spin packs a lot of information into its 80-minute running time, arguing that a great table tennis player is one part boxer, one part chess master.

It's all pure hokum, perfect for a Shirley MacLaine remake, but it's lovely to see Lafont carrying a film so effortlessly.

Mitchell's unwillingness to define the parameters of the specter haunting Jay leads to a finale that's muddled and confusing, and definitely not scary.

Avenged is an action-horror mash-up that's very silly, quite gruesome, and a whole lot of fun.

Ganem and her talented co-stars work hard, but Riedel's pacing is always a beat or two behind their mad energy, making for a film that's enormously appealing, but not quite addicting.

For most of its running time, Diving Normal doesn't work, and then it does, which makes it both maddening and memorable.

Sam Esmail’s first film has a visual assurance that suggests the arrival of a gifted director, but the characters he’s created are so off-putting that viewers aren’t likely to appreciate the beauty surrounding them.

Flamenco Flamenco is the most beautifully photographed film in recent memory. Come for the dance, stay for the light.

The new thriller from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is visually dazzling, but the story starts off silly and ends up a confusing, maddening mess.

Imagine I'm Beautiful is a thematically ambitious character study trapped inside the limiting strictures of a crazy-roommate thriller.

[A] slow-moving yet soulful documentary.

Housebound is a tad long, and its murder mystery a bit of a muddle, but that doesn’t matter. The final third is virtuoso.

[An] uneven but intriguing found-footage horror flick.

The film's finale is wild and daring and so perfectly executed that it marks Wright as one of the film year's most audacious new voices.

The screenplay is built of small moments and minute details that gradually gain significance, as should be the case in a good character study.

This movie is only 75 minutes long, so it's too bad that Hubner rushes the finale -- too much triumph, too little emotion -- but when the grooves are this rich, all is forgiven.

The Belgian Roskam, making only his second feature film, and his first in English, displays remarkable assurance, with both the actors and the film’s very American setting. He creates an escalating sense of dread, tinged with Lehane’s brand of mordant humor.

With a deft hand, Pray juxtaposes a history of Heizer's revolutionary career as a "negative space" sculptor with an insider's view of the insanely complex planning it took to move the two-story monolith.

As Above, So Below is sometimes creepy but mostly silly, which is too bad because the film's cramped subterranean setting is inherently unnerving.

Screenwriters Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore fail to conjure a single witty line. Nor is there any finesse to be found in director Brian A. Miller’s inept staging of car chases and shoot-outs.

Writer-director Matthew Weiner, creator of the magnificent Mad Men, has made a feature film — theoretically a comedy — that's just shy of terrible.

Watching the hopelessly vapid get taken out, one by one, has never been more depressing.

Very Good Girls is a film one wants to like but can't. It just doesn't work.

When Frankie, an understudy in a small dance company, is given his chance to perform, he, and Test itself, come to life.

Hellion offers Paul his most adult screen role so far, and he's very fine, but the movie belongs to Wiggins, a newcomer whose innate gifts are a perfect echo of Paul's.

Chris Teerink's superb film documents the work of artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), whose legacy lies not only in past accomplishments, but in the work he left for others to complete.

[Webber's] performance is crazy good, and so emotionally charged that viewers may be forgiving of a finale overloaded with silly twists.

Watermark is a documentary filled with images both beautiful and wrenching, yet the film as a whole is a disappointment.

It Felt Like Love is brilliantly, brutally tactile.

A compelling but ultimately unsatisfying film.

Ernest & Celestine -- a contender for this year's best animated film Oscar -- is pure delight.

Dark House is one nutty horror movie, but what's crazier still is how well it works — until it doesn't.

Date and Switch isn't a gay movie. It's a zippy, happy, buddy flick.

If the onscreen serial killer isn't having fun, how can we?

Devlin's script tips its hand so early on that Devil's Due lumbers toward a woefully flat, predictable ending, and the unwelcome promise of something truly demonic — sequels.

The stark prison Sabrina and a half dozen final contestants inhabit make the torture chambers of Hostel look inviting, but to their credit (perhaps), screenwriter Robert Beaucage and director Josh Waller never sugarcoat their grim tale.

Tucci and the English-born Eve make a riveting team, and although the film's final twist undercuts all that has come before, Some Velvet Morning is provocation of the most artful kind.

[A] clever but emotionally unengaging movie.

In this entertaining documentary, the coolest kids in town sing the praises of cartoonist Gahan Wilson, whose work is a brilliant fusion of the personal and the political.

If the characterizations are perfunctory, the performances give them unexpected weight.

Despite a few manic comic episodes, writer-directors Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier never again capture the sense of joyous connection that can exist between child and pet.

To use a phrase from the film, The Armstrong Lie is a "myth-buster." It's wholly necessary, brilliantly executed, and a complete bummer.

A vibrant color scheme and the deliciously evil cackle of Christopher Plummer elevate this kid-friendly animated adventure from Canada.

The cell phone reception in Dracula's castle is pretty bad, but it can't be as frustrating as trying to fathom the plot of this woefully muddled horror film.

Immigrant is reportedly based on writer-director Barry Shurchin's own family history, but the story he's chosen to tell is so melodramatic and relentlessly grim that any passion he feels for the material isn't reflected onscreen.

Bridging the Gap is gorgeous and weird.

Aided by capable if unnecessary 3D effects, Petty displays a flair for staging violent action, but he's trapped inside a broad comic set-up that doesn't mesh with the story's innate meanness.

The Summit is at its most powerful when the filmmakers simply tell the tale, which gradually develops the unsettling suspense of a horror movie, with K2 cast as the implacable killer.

Although Thornton and co-writer Tom Epperson are clearly trying to get to some essential truth about the ways in which machismo hinders love, their insights are scattered and pedestrian.

Writer-director Christian Vincent and co-writer Étienne Comar, aided by Frot's quiet intensity, imbue Hortense's quest to pull off culinary miracles with an urgency that's almost absurdly compelling, and all the more entertaining for it.

Dead Before Dawn's best jokes are grounded in the warm, believable camaraderie between Casper and his friends, but Mullen is less confident with crowds. The zemon-horde attack scenes are a visual jumble.

The smash-and-crash chase scenes are numbingly dull.

From cinematographer Corey Rich's beautifully framed footage, Wampler's wife, Elizabeth, making her directorial debut, has assembled a stirring film that's part documentary, and part promotional tool.

This Is Martin Bonner isn't exciting, but it's also never dull.

Lowery isn't a Malick and he's certainly no Kazan, but he's his own man, and a filmmaker to watch.

Athale has a flair for guy-pal banter; here, the talk is funny and profane, silly and profound, often in the same breath.

It's all very predictable, very Hollywood. Storytelling cliché, it would seem, knows no borders.

[A] pitch-perfect, deeply affecting film.

There are many things absent from this found-footage horror movie, including suspense, logic, and originality.

The game of wills that ensues between the two women isn't terribly interesting, much less suspenseful, and in fact, it's not clear that director Egidio Coccimiglio and screenwriter Floyd Byars ever settled on whether they were making a thriller or a satire about food and celebrity.

Vibrant cameo performances by two of our most engaging young actors—Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Ritter—along with one film legend—Tippi Hedren—transform this modest comedy into something special.

Always amusing, if never screamingly funny.

A thriller whose storytelling ingredients are so familiar that one could watch it with the sound off and still know what's going on.

Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised.

Director Ryûhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) is too talented for material this retro-junky, but he and screenwriter David Cohen keep the action coming hard and fast.