Eric Hynes

The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.

Though it’s culled from 600 hours of footage, Medora feels thin in terms of memorable imagery, and bounces a little too hastily between scenes. But it’s utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence.

Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.

Rote ageist jokes abound (“Do you guys have drugs?” asks a bachelorette; “Does Lipitor count?” responds Kline), but they come with an inclusive, self-deprecating spirit that grows more endearing over the duration.

There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.

An adaptation of a short story from David Sedaris’s best-selling Naked collection, C.O.G. (short for “Child of God”) struggles from the outset to retain the snap of the NPR favorite’s hyperbolic humor while also grounding it in authenticity—a tonal disconnect that nonetheless serves to destabilize a potentially predictable coming-of-age tale.

Given only hints of personalities and the thinnest strands of stories, we’re left with a hum of tinny snippets instead of anything that resembles the glorious noise of people putting on show after show after show.

While veteran director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and writer Jean-Claude Carrière don’t bring much novelty to the May-December/muse-artist/naked-clothed cliché, they do imbue the material with genuine feeling—exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.

The extreme variance of style and scrutability makes for wildly disorienting viewing.

How the geriatric ensemble dramedy became the last bastion of British cinema is a bit of a riddle, but like Cadbury Creme Eggs and Manchester soul, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.

Eager to please and easy on the eyes, The Kings of Summer sails right down the middle, safely tacking between sitcom setups and grandiose MGMT-scored montages without forming its own distinctive feel.

Eckhart’s status as the most likable too-handsome man this side of Chris Isaak will endure long after this film is erased from memory — which starts immediately.

Cassavetes adopts a grammar that occasionally slides into parody but mostly comes across as committed style. Kiss of the Damned contributes little new to the genre save a taste for alluringly tactile sex scenes and an avoidance of gore.

A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.

Loach coaxes an endearingly poised performance out of nonprofessional Brannigan, and largely sells these scuffling characters as neither hopeless nor heroic—just terribly human.

Brando-wheezing Gandolfini never slums it, but there’s still no shaking the sense that a pro has shown up for amateur hour.

This remake of ’70s Spanish horror film "Who Can Kill a Child?" is less a contemporary upgrade than an eagerly creaky exploitative throwback.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

It’s a kind of self-portrait made out of quotidian meals, naps and scattershot car-seat conversations, and though the loss that underlies Mark’s emotional state feels like a scripted conceit, The End of Love excels at conveying the moment-to-moment frustrations and exhilarations of being a dad.

With its rock-skimming male bonding alternating between grisly homicides and a florid Mexican standoff that begets a tidy take-the-money-and-run finale, this tale seems less timely than merely tall.

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

Despite committed and heartfelt performances - especially from the perennially charismatic Peters - director Lisa Albright's soapy semi-autobiographical tale fails to scale the low hurdle of believability.

No amount of eccentric Americana (or slyly marginal inventiveness) can salvage this strangely lifeless - and largely laughless - gonzo comedy, which is doomed by a flimsy script, one-dimensional characterizations and distractingly inept child acting.

Postdivorce reconciliation tales - not to mention mother-whore disquisitions - don't get more elaborate than this.

Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.