Eddie Cockrell

Impeccably crafted but dramatically turgid.

Lanthimos’ point seems to be that everyone has their own private weaknesses, but after a Lynchian first act in this strange world, he avoids any mainstream dramatic or satiric elements.

A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.

Intense but inscrutable tale involving a woman's gradual remembrance of a long-suppressed trauma.

Promising frosh helmer Felix van Groeningen exhibits a fresh eye, though his script is full of too many self-consciously Tarantino-ish verbal digressions that serve to distract from the story, and self-conscious quirks he mistakes for character development.

Will be of keen interest to fans but plays to the unwashed as cringingly pompous.

Ungainly titled, overlong, intermittently funny.

Enough of Yancey’s ambitious narrative has made the final cut to reflect an arrestingly original spin on trendy genre tropes.

As interesting as all this is, and as challenging and perilous it must have been to capture these images, Jirga’s elliptical approach to plot and selective use of subtitles does the finished product no favors.

A plea for attention to despicable conditions of female servitude in contempo Iran.

Unfortunately, Murat's decision to jump back and forth in time makes the film hard to follow for even the most committed viewer.

A stately, intermittently gripping, ultimately overlong drama.

Another ferocious perf by Janet McTeer and an atmospheric Malaysian jungle location are nearly lost in the DV muddiness of period drama The Intended.

Tale of an idealistic local caught in the crossfire of an illicit affair is too pat and pretty to connect with upscale audiences.

Schematically scripted tale revels in its multiple story arcs, but shows signs of battle fatigue in the later reels.

A deliberately coarse character style that's more Gumby than Gromit.

A little bit of Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek goes a long way. In the verbose profile documentary Zizek! there's a lot of esoteric, eccentric theories, and little context within his globetrotting life.

Playing like a moribund hybrid of "Thelma and Louise" and "The Trouble With Harry," lesbian-themed thriller Gasoline lacks sex drive.

An intermittently gripping story about an idealistic young boxer who becomes disillusioned with the Third Reich during his elite training, Napola is finally KO'd by an overdose of Nazi fetishism.

The serious subject of forced female circumcision becomes the stuff of predictable melodrama in God's Sandbox.

Debuting helmer Vicente Amorim provides a determined forward movement, which, while lacking in cultural explanation, gives the saga uplift and punch.

Has the frustrating feel of a rousing, epic oater sadly compromised.

A labored screwball comedy about disenchanted people of privilege yearning for fulfillment, pic is full of leaden hijinx directed and played with all the subtlety of a myocardial infarction.

What begins as a moderately interesting set of interconnected mysteries involving race and identity soon grows eye-rollingly laborious, not to mention increasingly derivative of Christopher McQuarrie's "Usual Suspects" script.

Too often depends on salty, adolescent one-liners that provide shock value guffaws but grow cumulatively wearisome.

Fiction writer and debuting helmer Mary Kuryla is clearly after a Big Statement on abuse and strength of character, but falls short by creating a self-destructive monster in lieu of a sympathetic protagonist.

It often resembles John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence," but just as often devolves into a series of bravura acting exercises strung together by an increasingly sketchy narrative theme.

Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.