Dan Callahan

The best scenes in this movie show that Guðmundsson has a talent for make-believe, drug trips and fantasy scenarios, and if there were more such set pieces in Beautiful Beings, then it might have been something more distinctive rather than the latest in a very long line of films about young people left on their own.

A very strained attempt to understand the motivations of the women who killed for Charles Manson.

The result is touching precisely because Boylan does not aggressively ask for sympathy for her character. She earns it by being fair, sensitive and honest as a performer but especially as a writer.

This is a slow-burning movie, but its stealth and intelligence eventually packs an emotional punch.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

There is only one inventive action sequence here.

Curtis’s twee, nudging, corny comedic voice is very much the main sensibility here, far more so than anything offered by director Danny Boyle or anyone else involved.

Dabka winningly traces the ways that a callow American gets schooled in concepts like honor and sacrifice until he is considered an expert on a country and a people that he grows to love.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk winds up being a wearying experience, not because of its emotional content but because of its lack of cohesion and its ultimate collapse into gross and unearned sentimentality.

For implausibility, perversity, cluelessness, and sheer silliness, it’s hard to imagine another movie this year that will top Last Words.

Unfortunately, the second half of Firebird is far less involving than the first.

Tucked away in The Independent is a smaller family drama in which Elisha deals with her parents and the illness of her father. These scenes are far better than anything else in the film because Turner-Smith gets to play something realistic rather than over-the-top and plot-driven.

Movies don’t get much juicier, funnier, creepier, sadder, or smarter than writer-director Justin Kelly‘s King Cobra.

Hot to Trot brings up some intriguing differences between straight and gay ballroom dancing without ever quite exploring them in depth.

Ver Linden never goes the commercial route here with her high-concept idea. Like Palmer, she stays true to her goal but does give the audience several satisfying moments that call for applause.

Allen is too self-aware and cold a creative personality to create a genuine tragedy in Wonder Wheel. Instead, he makes a gesture towards a tragic situation.

Logan is more interested in psychological horror than in the typical slice-and-dice of slasher movies, and in several scenes here he achieves a remarkable intensity.

This is very much a vehicle for Parker, and it plays into some of her strengths and many of her weaknesses.

There are some movies that are misguided in a simple way, and then there are those rare unrelentingly awful movies like Flower that decide to go wrong in as many ways as possible in as short a time as possible.

This movie is so crushing mainly because it was made by obviously smart people who are trying to dumb themselves down, and there’s nothing more excruciating than that.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.

Even if budgetary restraints sometimes keep Timoner from fully capturing the time she is re-creating, nothing holds Smith back from making Mapplethorpe come alive again, in every sense.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

The awkwardly titled gay rugby romance In from the Side is so padded out at 134 minutes with both rugby games and sex scenes that the final effect is numbing, and writer-director Matt Carter doesn’t bother much with either plot or character to fill out his narrative.

Almost Love is one of those ultra-mild movies that is reliant almost entirely on the likability of its large cast.

Given the outlandishness of the material here, it would have been easy to start getting unwanted laughs in the second half of the film, but Pettyfer and his actors find the truth in it, even in a very long and demanding take where Harley confronts his mother in prison.

There is a tug-of-war here between [Bailey's] attempt to explore her characters in a very serious way with a consistent emotional basis and the demands of the material as written by Glen Lakin, which is clearly meant to be played as farce most of the time, particularly towards the end.

It isn’t comedy, and it isn’t drama, much less comedy-drama.