Eric Hynes

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.

Miller’s ace in the hole is the hulking, regal Harper, whose round face vacillates between childlike mirth and lung-stomping sadness. His casual charisma not only commands our attention and affection, it sidelines every social or thematic concern to this singular, tentatively aspiring life.

There's influential, and then there's this 1953 microbudgeted beauty, one that's made its way into the DNA of everything from cinema vérité to the French New Wave.

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.

Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

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.

The film develops into a sweet, surprisingly persuasive comedy about friends transitioning into family.

Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.

The problem is that the filmmaker brings D-grade craft to these B-movie exertions, making his florid maximalism more entertaining to talk about than endure - despite the best efforts of his ardently slumming A-list cast.

The most "Naked City"–worthy aspect is the film's temperature, fixed precisely between cool posturing and broiling anomie. Its vision of contemporary Thailand is recognizable as another society undeserving of redemption, but worthy of poetry.

The problem is that screen mayhem has a tendency to translate as hip posturing, and Little Birds' scenes of shoplifting shenanigans and pistol-whipping showdowns all too readily conform to indie-film form and style.

The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise.

There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.

Truthfully, watching septuagenarian whores spank mildly titillated johns and test-drive sex toys has never seemed so ho-hum - or so oddly familiar.

Farmiga persuades as a kooky monster of a matriarch, while Javier is an ideal vessel for Duchovny's laconic line readings (he's grown into an even more deadpan Bill Murray). Goats may cover an all-too-familiar terrain, but at least it grazes it well.

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.

Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

Sorvino's Bronx bawler veers from mascara-streaked monster to outer-borough sage as each scene requires, while Savoca's agitated camera strains for handheld immediacy but ends up just looking amateurish and ugly.

There are subtler, more allusive films about stormy conflicts of the heart, but A Burning Hot Summer wisely knows when and how to surgically slice directly to the bone. It's a bad romance of the highest order.

Alice Rohrwacher's debut fictional feature is an uncommonly insightful portrait of nascent womanhood, assisted in no small measure by Vianello's disarmingly naturalistic performance.

Brazilian filmmaker Júlia Murat's first narrative feature is a mesmerizing, slow-build marvel.