Ernest Hardy

Though the heavy-handed score is emotionally manipulative, Rokab alternates between hopeful and grim prognoses, mercifully providing a measure of hope and possibility that many films of this ilk do not.

All the characters are broadly sketched, though well acted. Beyond that, the innate tension of the subject matter — and the shamelessly manipulated emotions — carries the film to its uplifting ending.

Written and directed by Tommy Oliver, 1982 is a ham-fisted morality tale about love, marriage and the fallout of the ‘80s crack epidemic as though told by someone whose intel on all three came primarily from pulp sources.

This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.

Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.

So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.

At a minimum, the film might inspire some people to hit up Google for a crash course on this historical narrative.

The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.

The film twists tension in the viewer's gut as the clock ticks toward a day of reckoning. But the script could be tougher-minded.

In showing how some men derive primal, perverse senses of pleasure and power from their brutality, how small men make themselves feel large and invincible, the film distills the roots of terror (political, cultural, religious) to truths that are tragically evergreen.

The emotional and narrative core of the story is how much tragedy swirls through Petrov's personal life — from his parents pushing him into the military at the age of seventeen to his marriage to the unraveling of his circumstances after his heroic decision. It is heart-wrenching stuff that you might wish the filmmakers had trusted more.

Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly.

Director Ruby Yang doesn't even try to upend the clichés that practically define the kind of inspirational documentary she's made about art transforming the lives of at-risk and disabled students. She embraces them while pushing the film toward an eye-misting ending you'll see coming from the opening moments.

The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.

People Places Things crackles to life whenever the camera turns to one of Will's students, Kat (The Daily Show's Jessica Williams), and her professor mother, Diane (Regina Hall).

What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.

Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.

There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them.

In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.

Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.

It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.

Presswell's stylized dialogue, whose rapid-fire banter often hardens into self-conscious artifice, is biting and witty, but is thankfully absent either endless pop-culture references or cloying self-consciousness of its own cleverness.

Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.

Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.

Sampled old newsreel and security-camera footage flesh out the narrative, and the film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together.

Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.

The film hits its mark of being a popcorn action flick just fine.

Walter's self-conscious efforts at quirkiness...and cartoonishly drawn characters...try too hard while falling far short of their marks.

Politically simplistic (if not naive) and aesthetically sterile.

The acting is community-theater-level, and the sets look phony, but there's unintentional humor in counting the clichés as they mount.

What could have been an impossibly bleak viewing is actually made more unnerving through DeFriest's droll humor and acceptance of his fate — rather than being Zen-like, he's prickly and dark, with such dazzlingly high native intelligence that you mourn for potential needlessly wasted.

The brisk, informative film wants to press the urgency of this perfect storm of capitalistic opportunism but is weakened by a frequently overwrought score and cheap graphics that often give Business something of a histrionic undertone.

The film itself is solidly and conventionally crafted. Newsreels and stock footage alternate with fresh interviews with friends and scholars, steadfast supporters and unabashed detractors. The political life it maps out fascinates.

You need not be a student or scholar of dance to be completely enthralled by Greg Vander Veer's documentary Miss Hill.

Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.

Too bad that Josh's story, ostensibly the core of the film, is overshadowed by Calloused Hands' retro racial views.

The film is riveting from the start, with its ragtag multiculti heroines and heroes meshing multiple identity markers (activist, academic, refurbished hippie), often within individual selves.

The film's abrupt ending leaves many crucial questions unanswered, but that weakness doesn't detract from its overall power.

Unfortunately, given both its content and the media's collective failure to fully report the (ongoing) story, the film only intermittently has a pulse.

There's an off-putting self-absorption in [Tirf's] self-examination-slash-ode-to-Haiti, and it weakens the whole project.

Despite its weighty material and some moving scenes (much of the Sudanese cast are survivors of the war), this aggressive crowd-pleaser is slighter than its subject matter deserves.

The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.

It's all well acted and expertly crafted — quick edits that play mind and visual games with the viewer, music that heightens tension, some cool special effects — but most of the victims are people you want to slap even before their secrets are spilled.

There's a lot of potential in the idea of exploring asexuality in the modern world, but The Olivia Experiment loses it in a sea of clichéd characters.

Its considered use of ice and snow-covered vistas against the expanse of blue sky offers great beauty while capturing something of what pulls the adventurous to try to reach the world's second highest peak.

There are moments in director David Midell's NightLights that play like PSAs, but that earnestness is paved over by wonderfully affecting performances.

Writer-director Scott Schirmer eschews the ironic approach, thankfully, and instead works to pull genuine tension from his material. He does that quite well, and any unintentional laughs (or eye rolls) are icing.

The film looks great; the animation is detailed, fluid in action and meticulously designed, and the action sequences are meticulously mapped out. But K Missing Kings is really for diehards who have not only embraced the series but also the handful of manga it spawned.

The lack of a critical framework means that some of the most intriguing notions the interviewees put forth are never explored.

What will pull viewers in is the empathy of the healthcare workers who battle to retain their idealism in the face of staggering obstacles.

The World Famous Kid Detective is a poorly written, acted, and directed kid flick with one cool idea: It's chock full of snippets from old detective noir flicks.

The film isn't as biting as The Player or Swimming with Sharks, and neither Howard's struggles nor Lydia's mystery is a match for the electricity of the supporting actresses in their brief roles.

Superficiality and cliché mark the film's notions of family, dysfunction, and even survival.

It's an admittedly hagiographic film, an unabashed celebration of the man and his work and worldview. The few mild naysayers are largely set up to be knocked down, but as such the film is invigorating.

While Hall and Shepard nail their parts, Don Johnson, still magnetic after all these years, steals the film as a sardonic private eye with a vintage cherry-red convertible.

From the cool voiceover to the crisp dialogue, the script strikes the perfect balance between stylized and naturalistic language that is profane, poetic, and prophetic.

A must-see documentary.

Despite the shakiness of their collective accents, the cast goes through the paces of this tense, testosterone-driven shoot-'em-up with gusto.

An insightful, often funny, never glib character-driven tale about class angst, withered dreams, and the costs of adulthood.

Because her tale is so fascinating, movie-making formula is all that's needed.

Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Rob Meltzer from a script by Jeff Kauffmann, is satanically bad.

It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.

Guinzburg's retool is full of unintentional humor, high-school-theater level acting, and shoddy writing.

Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.

A small gem of a film, Breakfast is a lovely tapestry of subtlety, full of sly, smart humor and unforced insights into human nature.

The cast (which includes familiar character actors like Nicolas Coster and David Leisure) is wildly uneven, talent-wise, and there's a stiltedness to the film's earnestness, but its sincerity is palpable.

As the film dissects various cultural norms and goes behind the scenes of the $5 billion penis enhancement industry, it transcends the concerns of one man to show the flipside of the gender equality movement.

Writer-director Luiz Bolognesi's film doesn't push the envelope in terms of technique or style, but its fast-moving story roils with a righteous anger that is mesmerizing as Bolognesi whips up a Zelig-like overview of Brazil's tortured history.

Wendy J.N. Lee's Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey powerfully connects the dots between the enormity of global warming as a phenomenon and the havoc it wreaks in ordinary lives.

Schwarz's juxtaposition of the human cost of the drug war alongside the glamorization of its henchmen and their brutality is sobering, even depressing.

Its soap-opera plot is old hat, and the largely amateurish acting of the ensemble makes it hard to connect with many of the characters.

A film whose sense of urgency and purpose is utterly engrossing.

It's utterly rousing watching the women master their instruments and then push past the birth pains of their new business enterprise, and it's completely wrenching as their individual backstories unfold.

A vanity project riding the waves of a socio-political moment, Two confirms just as many stereotypes as it attempts to dismantle.

What emerges is an illuminating look at the ways race, specifically blackness, has been cynically portrayed by the mainstream media, rightwing politicians and religious leaders, and even some white queer activists.

What distinguishes this doc from much of the tedious critical prose Romero has inspired is the fan-boy and fan-girl ardor that fuels its smarts--both behind and in front of the camera.

The film ends on up notes, but its strength is that it's not really a feel-good movie, instead shining a light on both how far we have come in terms of race in America and how very far we still have to go.

It's an often gut-wrenching viewing experience in which the triumphs of the hero are hard won.

There are undoubtedly several moving moments in the film, and the kids are gorgeous and heartbreaking, but none of that is strong enough to balance Braat's galling and enabled narcissism, which pervades the film.

While Escape is filled with inspired touches... Moore lacks the off-kilter psychological nuances of Lynch, as well as the go-for-broke storytelling skills and visual élan. It doesn't help that the cast is largely competent at best.

Without forcing the material into facile uplift, Bloodworth-Thomason still edges it into the realm of inspirational, never overplaying the anguish or soft-pedaling the bigotry at the heart of the story.

There are a handful of laughs, but nothing to balance the onslaught of clichés.

The film ultimately plays less as female empowerment than it does a narrative in which the comeuppance doled out is likely to be received as a digestif for those in the audience who got off on the gendered violence in the first place.

Still, the vibrantly shot Lucky Star could have been a mildly entertaining bit of escapism, were it not for the fact that Sophie isn't naïve so much as infantile, a point driven home by her wardrobe.

One part stand-up comedy concert film (think Kings of Comedy) to two parts social outreach activism, documentary The Muslims Are Coming! works somewhat better as the latter than the former.

Yudin pulls lovely philosophical grace notes from his subjects as they illuminate some universal truths from their very specific world.

The Colony has modest rewards: It's decently acted, delivers some well-executed jolts, doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, and is mercifully free of ironic distance.

To be fair, the cast is largely good, given the material.

[Kosareff] backburners what's most fascinating (stories of former titans of the industry; segments discussing how shifting social mores impacted said industry, the key roles of women in the factories) and squanders a chance to discuss the larger implications.

Informant is riveting as it slowly assembles a damning profile of its subject. It's also timely.

Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.

A documentary that is by turns exasperating, illuminating, and intentionally infuriating.

If Secret can leave the viewer despairing, it's also hugely inspiring, thanks to Mino. She's one of the cinematic heroines of the year.

From concept to execution to tone, writer-director Liz W. Garcia's The Lifeguard is a lifeless misfire.

Cudlitz gives a haunted performance as a weathered, misogynistic, homophobic, blue-collar man roiling with demons, and Griffith can break your heart as a good woman staggering under the weight of life.

This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.

Writer-director Thomas Verrette's thriller grapples with the foundational relationship between memory and self-identity. It's a well-trod path of exploration, and Verrette-- largely competent, often pedestrian-- doesn't bring much new to the investigative process.

The cast—and Evans's deft hand with them—makes it worth checking out.