Dennis Harvey

Though Torn flirts with filmmaking-as-therapy, it doesn’t dig discomfitingly deep.

While the personalities spotlit here are easy to root for, what emerges is less an upbeat look at female enterprise than yet another case of corporate money and political mechanizations killing off community-based small businesses to further enrich their deep-pocketed, invasive new rivals. It’s an ultimately depressing trajectory, though the film itself remains engaging and well crafted.

A graceful, touching sampler of dilemmas few viewers are likely to have experienced, even as they become ever-more-common reality for the less fortunate in many nations.

One Shot manages to avoid seeming an overly schematic technical stunt. The mayhem depicted isn’t always fully convincing, but it does have a certain live-wire edge.

The tension provided by dank claustrophobia and threat of suffocation, as air supplies dwindle, makes this house a very scary place to be.

Emir Ezwan’s directorial debut is a spare, eerie tale rooted in folk superstitions that are rendered credibly vivid by its thick yet subtle atmospherics.

This is sci-fi cinema of a relatively subtle, intriguing stripe, without the usual emphasis on fantastical or action imagery. Still, it’s slickly engaging enough to please more open-minded genre fans, and brainy enough to attract those who want something other than another laser shoot ’em up.

Where Freeland is an unadulterated success is in capturing the physical, psychological and spiritual space Devi inhabits.

Overall, this is a fun way to spend 100 minutes or so, warts and all.

It works hard stylistically to provide a good time. But that would have been a better bet had at least as much effort been put into a screenplay whose ideas, both comic and macabre, remain undernourished.

The audacity of de Silveira’s concept — in which enrollees at an upscale Christian college indulge in secret, moralizing vigilante mayhem — and her deliberately over-the-top aesthetic render Medusa a compelling mixed bag. It may miss the bull’s-eye, but not for lack of intriguing ideas or style.

The result is at once fun and fatiguing. Scary it’s not, and many viewers will find their patience tested by the character they most hope will be dealt a quick demise being the one we’re principally stuck with.

The Gateway moves quickly enough to hold attention, if not to cover up its ill-matched individual elements, let alone meld them into a coherent vision.

Vitaletti’s storytelling, and ability to drum up tension or scares, is less potent here than his attention to evoking a general climate of close-minded religious hypocrisy.

Timlin bears a good-enough resemblance, and gives as much of a rounded performance as she can. But this conception provides no insight into any real HRC, past or present, and seems trite even as a fictionalized act of hostility toward whatever she represents to the filmmakers. Which is, in a word, murky.

It’s an embarrassing vanity showcase that’s deliberately campy without actually being fun, and whose stalled-adolescent “transgression” may only appeal to a few actual adolescents.

Worse things have happened to Oscar winners, but it’s still unfortunate to see both Richard Dreyfuss and Mira Sorvino flailing in the inept muddle of Crime Story.

The Last Matinee is less effective as a straight horror film than it is as a self-conscious genre homage, providing excitement more of the eye-candy design than the visceral ilk. Still, it’s adequately diverting fare for those who’ll grok its somewhat insular appeal.

It’s another effective use of a simple premise and modest means to create a nicely nerve-jangling thriller.

In the end, both documentary and the jump itself feel like ambitious vanity projects that are admirably accomplished, yet feel a little hollow in the raison d’être department.

Part of the problem is that since everything is at so incessant a fever pitch, suspense flattens rather than builds, and we don’t care much about characters who spend nearly all their time yelling instructions at each other.

Originality may indeed be scarce in writer-director Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s debut narrative feature. Yet this gory goulash of city slickers, creepy yokels, editorial jolts and cannibalism largely transcends its derivative basic elements, thanks to his astute, richly atmospheric handling.

In “Corpus Christi,” Bielenia was electric, but then he had Mateusz Pacewicz’s great script to work with. Here, he retains some charisma in a hard-working performance, but it’s not enough to singlehandedly provide this screenplay with meaning.

Just about every possible peril turns up to thwart their mission en route, making for an increasingly implausible action movie that will entertain most viewers, but also perhaps make them feel a bit played for fools.

If terror is not particularly sought after, there is still sufficient tension, and downplaying the story’s fantastical aspect in favor of psychological conflicts lends the whole a persuasive pathos.

[An] engrossing, flavorful document.

It’s all more involving than it is frustrating. That’s thanks in large part to the nuanced performances of the leads, whose work ensures that at least the first half of the term “psychological thriller” feels well-realized here.

Beyond finding a godsend in Gellner, Rehmeier gets good mileage from nearly the entire supporting cast. They grasp the slightly warped humor he’s aiming for here, hitting a suitable range of comedic notes from the deadpan to the broadly farcical.