Craig D. Lindsey

Blacklight cuts corners everywhere.

The filmmaker, who also co-edited The Novice, depicts Alex’s freshman year in quick-cutting, frenetic, anxiety-ridden fashion, with composer Alex Weston’s string-heavy score properly ratcheting up the tension and Fuhrman gamely acting like a harried but dedicated ball of nerves.

As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive.

Straight-faced and suspenseful at first, wacky and almost randomly nihilistic afterwards, South Of Heaven just doesn’t know what it wants to be.

As hellaciously predictable and preposterous as Sweet Girl is, it could win over viewers nursing their own grudge against Big Pharma. Mainly, though, this is a vehicle for its star, that brawny softie Momoa.

I’ll be straight with you: This movie is awful. And not the fascinating, Alexander Nevsky (the action star/filmmaker, not the 13th-century prince) kind of awful — it’s the does-anybody-involved-know-what-the-hell-they’re-doing kind of awful.

Sure, it’s kind of entertaining to see the studly, studious Mortensen slap on a few pounds and go way out with the fuggeddaboutit talk as he tries to shoot the shit with Ali’s pedantic, closeted virtuoso. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him ham it up. But the leads mostly are saddled with literal, middle-of-the-road material.

While the movie does address white people’s thorny relationship with rap and cultural appropriation, it demonstrates how delicate satirizing that can be when it gets kind of serious near the end — a long, long end — and suggests that being the best at battle rap can also mean being the worst.

The movie lays on the melodrama too thick.

Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.

There’s something oddly fascinating (and — dare I say it! — watchable) about a movie being this defiantly dumb. I never thought I’d say this, but this guy could give Tommy Wiseau a run for his money in the best worst filmmaker department.

It’s downright sad watching Willis go all half-assed in another movie. I guess we’re gonna have to wait for Glass to come out next year to see if Willis can do a movie in whole-assed form again.

From the characters to the purposely perplexing plot, it’s all hollow and artificial to the point of being downright grating. Blue Iguana is another exercise in sarcastic, self-referential, postmodern pulp whose time has so come and gone.

All through the film, you pray it doesn’t go down the bleak routes that films like this usually go — and, most of the time, it does. Night Comes On is an assured first shot from Spiro but, damn, I couldn’t wait for this fucking thing to be over.

No Date, No Signature presents a story of flawed but generally decent people trying to put right what went so horribly wrong.

Unfortunately, the narrative focus constantly shifts and never coalesces.

China Salesman has got to be one of the most baffling, expensive pats on the back China has ever given itself.

For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps.

While it’s obvious Allred wanted to make a possibly autobiographical, blatantly meta take on how insane young adults get when they fall in love, The Texture of Falling ends up being one baffling, infuriatingly pretentious exercise in indie filmmaking.

This movie is just a stockpiled compendium of terrible decisions, both behind and in front of the camera.

Overboard is a manipulative mindfuck dressed up as a lightweight, heartwarming comedy.

Boom makes the case that the scene Basquiat came from was more fascinating than Basquiat himself. Even though many of the artists, admirers, and friends interviewed for this doc praise him and his gonzo genius, several of them suggest that he strived to be more of a rock star than a punk artist.

What this tiresome, out-of-pocket-ass movie actually does is create a painfully kooky, mad world where the only good thing about it is that Rosario Dawson can still turn men into idiots with her presence.

I guess that’s ultimately what Reed and Gunn wanted to provide: a view of African Americans that’s messy, complicated, dramatic, and, most important, honest. It’s also a fascinating artifact of black people getting together and making their own art — mainly because they wanted to see themselves properly represented onscreen.

What We Started is a cute roundup of how EDM came to be, but much like the DJs it shines a light on, it only scratches the surface.

As sleek and polished as Us and Them looks, it finds Martin not only biting from more established filmmakers, but biting off more than he can chew.

Unfortunately, this movie has so many damn things percolating all through it that it ultimately seems unfocused and painfully earnest.

The filmmakers do an effective job at making a clever horror show out of postpartum depression. So it’s a shame the movie goes off the deep end in the final act, as the story literally comes to a bloody, tragic finish.