Eric Hynes

Radnor tries to pin a tail of significance on this donkey, but he seems content with light comedy and mere proficiency. To which we can only reply: Nothankyounomoremilquetoast-please.

What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

Uniting Sacha Baron Cohen's daredevilry with Werner Herzog's bombast, Brügger aims to expose "the evilness of North Korea" with a gloriously incoherent, kazoo-and-whoopee-cushion–inflected stage show starring a self-proclaimed "spastic."

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

Jaglom can craft a scene and stage organic conversations, but if his saps and suckers never wander beyond a hermetic view of the real world, then so what?

Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.

Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.

The movie's twitchy, diabolical monster is neither persuasive nor historically tenable, and unlike Arendt's Eichmann, he's far too easy to dismiss.

It's an inspiring narrative-as are the interwoven stories of three students hoping to earn that educational gift-but the doc itself is more of a telethon-ready fund-raiser than a work of dramatic reportage.

It's entertainment designed to resemble a good time without aspiring to provide one.

Inane dialogue, extraneous scenes and wooden performances make for an experience that's less edge-of-your-seat than one very long, amateur hour and a half.

While never uproarious, Punching the Clown exudes the clever, warped sincerity of its star, eschewing uppercuts for a series of playful jabs.

Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.

A tepid rom-com, replete with a nostalgic Bangles tune.

A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.

A mess of arrhythmic editing, mopey first-person inserts and distractingly choppy narration, all making a heady topic that much more difficult to follow. To focus or not to focus should have been the first question.

With tinkling thriller music and dramatic voiceover narration, this modest but engrossing first-person documentary comes on like a true crime caper.

There's inherent drama in watching a person amble up a mountain, but it's an act of bad faith to oversell a stunt.

Unlike satires that coast on winking self-satisfaction, Anusha Rizvi's debut is both a heartfelt and a genuinely funny skewering of India's convoluted caste-consciousness.

Impassioned, but wearisomely didactic, diaspora drama.

The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.

The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.

It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.

It's hardly worth slogging through a full hour of unexplained bondage and a so-bombastic-it-seems-sarcastic score, only to be rewarded with a plea for tolerance that's both insincere and inept.

Convention plays like 11 cameras in search of drama.

The Virginity Hit is elevated by its cast of very funny young actors who match good comic timing with relaxed spontaneity.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.

What’s unique to Beadie Finzi’s debut feature is what it reveals about the financial, physical and emotional costs of talent.