Drew Hunt

It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.

Aside from being another rote addition to the revenge-film canon, John Stockwell's In The Blood is also a supreme waste of Gina Carano's talent.

The film is made impetuously watchable and disarmingly emotional by the filmmakers' strong command of docudrama and nonfiction narrative style.

While the film is deeply romantic and nostalgic, possessing a genuine reverence for youth and rebellion, it's also something of a tragedy.

Sini Anderson's film may be another unimaginative fan letter, but at least Kathleen Hannah is worthy of such devotion.

Perhaps the first important film about street hoops, even if the overall product struggles from a lack of focus.

The prevailing attitude behind the film can be boiled down to a simplistic idea: the cruder, the better.

Markus Imhoof's film reveals itself as a curious, audacious mix of personal essay film and nature documentary.

More than just a thorough examination of hardcore pornography, Christina Voros's doc is also a sort of chronicle of the filmmaking process.

Florian Habicht unwisely shifts his focus from Sheffield and its unique denizens to the band's personal history, effectively turning the film into an episode of Behind the Music.

The film benefits greatly from this bait-and-switch narrative design, as Hoss-Desmarais dials down or otherwise forgoes exposition, backstory, and character development in favor of an ambiguous, almost ethereal dramaturgical approach.

The film is at its most fascinating when Jackie Stewart authoritatively and pedagogically discusses the nuances of his trade.

More than some run-of-the-mill social-awareness doc, the film pays as much attention to the personal and emotional strife of its subjects as it does to their activism.

Good, clean genre entertainment, the sort of harmless yet endearing brand of moviemaking seemingly unattainable in today's Hollywood system.

The film exhibits strong character interplay and resides in an unconventional milieu, in effect turning rote material into something that feels decidedly eccentric.

Ian Softley is far too interested in the minutia of the plot to bother with the Chabrolian elements of bourgeois excess or the Hitchcockian themes of mistaken identity.

Taylor Guterson's film offers thoughtful, if familiar, comments on friendship, self-doubt, and romantic angst.

The cogent character study nestled inside all the bombast remains crafty for its rare commingling of artful storytelling and genre nonsensicality.

Commingling industry shoptalk with introspective insights and wrangling testimonials, the film casts an incredibly wide net, but doesn't reveal much of anything.

Its blind reverence toward the Russian mythos is so grandiose that it becomes impossible to rescue it from self-importance, and as such President Putin would likely give it two big thumbs up.

The overall product doesn't reveal anything about its subject that a Wikipedia page couldn't do just as well.

As Renny Harlin's career progresses, it seems more and more that his early gems were merely happy accidents.

This third and supposedly final edition in the franchise is nothing more than an uncomfortably transparent contractual obligation.

Heaven Is for Real is by Christians, for Christians, and deliberately, if subtly, antagonistic toward everyone else.

The filmmakers certainly exaggerate (i.e. exploit) their subject, but for a community that prides itself on shock value, there seems no sufficient alternative.

Its views on organized religion are so halfhearted and perfunctory as to make Kevin Smith's Dogma seem like a veritable master's class in theistic studies.

Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.

The characters' marginalized social standing is less indicative of a real-life epidemic and more akin to window dressing.