Gabe Toro

Young Bodies Heal Quickly is a haunting film, mostly because the title remains forever in doubt.

Director Johanna Hamilton should be credited for getting these faces in front of the camera, to humanize political rebellion of an early era not as some sepia-toned memory, but a story of very human individuals.

The fashion mogul feels as if she’s learning bit by bit how to tell a story cinematically, how to complete transitions and flash back and forward, how to set a mood and tempo. It’s basically the rough cut of a student film which, to its credit, is also often more interesting than most student films outright.

This is Stewart's show, and it's a dynamite role for anyone, never mind the screen's beloved Professor Xavier. The actor slips away and Tobi ultimately dominates the screen to the point where you lose track of the film proper and become Tobi's guest.

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

Much of the credit must go towards the makeup crew. It's a Fangoria funhouse up in here: Cabin Fever: Patient Zero has some of the most disturbing, disgusting gore effects of all-time. This is a movie made by people who have studied some of the worst injuries known to man.

It can't be overstated what kind of a marvel these Turtles are onscreen, however. As crude and unpleasant their design might be, they feel like living, breathing things, not special effects.

It's mythmaking for dummies, a Hercules with no poetry, only incompetent brute strength.

The Kill Team doesn't saint Winfield at all, instead, smartly casting responsible, impartial questions as to what his options could have been.

It's basically the perfect summer movie, because it's designed to be.

You wish Evelyn Purcell's action thriller just had a bit more character, and not a budget-cutting location that looked great in front of a camera.

This one veers further from actual horror into an action picture. “The Purge” tries to unsettle. The Purge: Anarchy wants you to cheer.

It's all fist-pumping anti-thought, consisting of baseless revisionist history and idle contrarianism.

About Alex is about too much and too little, a sandbox for its considerable cast, but ultimately just following the reunion rulebook.

It feels like this is a short film idea stretched to feature length, and the padding doesn't work.

This is a laughably bad movie, but an amazing drinking game waiting to happen.

It's ludicrous genre fun even if you didn't take into account the properly-bewitching Ms. Bang.

An end-film tease for a laughably unnecessary part two feels emblematic of the entire film: McKee and Sivertson aren't interested in laying any groundwork regarding cogent themes or diverse characterization, because there are skulls to be split and blood to be drank.

Being played by Gregg himself makes the transition more organic than it was for Rockwell in "Choke," but it still rings false.

What's distinct about Mr. Jones is that it lengthily utilizes three separate storytelling techniques... Given the sloppiness of Karl Mueller's directorial debut, it feels less like innovation and more like an attempt to cover up shortcomings.

The film is borderline installation-worthy, and would probably work just as well if the scenes were drastically re-arranged.

Buzzard is a quiet, introspective film, but it trumps all generic blockbusters in that it very much is a roller coaster ride, one that thrills, upsets, and makes one queasy, all in surprising ways.

This is a unique, strange, unforgettable film, a half-remembered dream that will trouble and beguile the subconscious long after you’ve moved on.

With its rock doc trappings, it’s impossible to ignore that Mistaken For Strangers delivers on that front, with thrilling and candid on-stage footage that allows the band’s music to come alive: if you weren’t a fan before, you will be after the film.

Devos keeps her character’s unreliability and self-disappointment relatable, and falling backwards into a new lover is something that Devos captures beautifully with her uncertain facial expressions and hungry eyes.

When Lotz is not onscreen, Stephens is miserable company. But James does reveal a deep fascination with the robotics that suggests the threadbare story was a chance for him to explore the very real advances in artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, the picture becomes an old-fashioned Bible Belt actioner, a shift towards genre that works on its own, but is tonally a peculiar place to take the events of the film following a string of several shocking and not-so-shocking revelations.

Black Out ultimately limps to feature length, burying its intriguing leading man underneath endless mishaps and shenanigans.

This is easily more exciting and tense than any genre film 2014 has seen thus far.

Karr came up through documentary filmmaking, and he knows how to turn the switch on an event to make it feel immediate and dangerous. Unfortunately, the picture strands its characters in the middle of this event, building to a climax that seems open-ended if only because the story, and its skimpy characters, has nowhere to explore.

The film’s dismal action staging and over-complex story can’t seem to overcome Mr. Fairbrass’s lo-fi presence.

Van Damme’s an arresting presence in his old age... His performance is a wonder, showcasing a man who has never found his physical equal, and how amuses himself by telling stories that ultimately mock opponents.

For being a kids-centric film, the picture is relatively slow and joyless.

Despite the affecting drama and performances, Run and Jump just never feels more that perfunctory in this regards.

Wanting to create a leading character worth rooting for, and experiencing the schadenfreude that comes from her failure, is a complex balancing act, one that Adult World simply cannot pull off.

He (Fishburne) rips into his dialogue like steak, savoring every word as if he were paid by the syllable. For a moment, we’re in a different movie, one where someone has decided to singlehandedly deconstruct a cliché. It’s a very short moment.

The picture isn’t plotted with story beats, only shock moments.

You get the feeling that if there were less fighting and more character work, not only would Bell knock it out of the park, but Raze would be a better, more interesting movie.

It’s easily the most suspenseful American film of the year, a thriller that feels like lightning across a quiet night sky; sudden, terrifying, and excitingly singular.

It's all very cheap, wholly unconvincing, and loaded with dull narration.

Caught In The Web grows slack as its premise evolves.

With its broad, ambiguous title, S#x Acts reminds us, with heartbreaking power, that sometimes vigilance just isn't enough, and all it takes is an "act" or two to change a life forever.

Ultimately of course, this is Statham’s show, and as always he doesn’t disappoint.

Lenny Cooke isn't a documentary, it's an autopsy, detailing exactly why Cooke vanished off the map and why he struggled to get back into the game, a focus that goes micro where other sports docs go macro.

The Starving Games is the sixth directorial effort from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and they are nothing if not consistent.

LaBute has consistently made intriguing, often idiosyncratic films in his career, but he hasn't made anything this unsettling and unforgettable in a very long time.

Takes the standard gangster movie template and blasts it out of the water.

It’s as if “The Man Of Steel” was ninety minutes of supervillians shit-talking Superman, then casually sticking kryptonite in his face without even pretending it’s a surprise.

Escape Plan deserves some credit for gradually rising from abysmal to almost-mediocre, though it’s needlessly complicated in every step of the way.

Forgetting the Girl ends up building towards a massive revelation, one that suddenly gives up the ghost and allows the film to define itself as one specific genre. Not romance or thriller or comedy, mind you, but that type of indie that plays peek-a-boo with its topics for long enough before springing something that allows the final twenty minutes to be occupied by bargain-basement pop psychology.

It’s an ugly, unpleasant viewing experience, one that sees geek culture as a hateful cesspool of exclusion and juvenility, miserable to experience first-hand.

Like its predecessor, Machete Kills is never less than busy with ridiculousness.

This is a frequently titillating film, and Weigert can’t help but add dimensions to that onscreen intimacy and vivid exploration of intimacy, not just seduction but also the shared sensuality of a post-coital chat.

Bad Milo! is ultimately a fairly pedestrian film, but in those moments where Milo takes action, if you squint, there’s just a little bit of that old-fashioned movie magic.

This is the sort of movie that should be playing in the background on an episode of “Tim And Eric,” and yet instead it’s being released by IFC Films. Bring alcohol.

The workmanlike precision of On the Job carries through to its action scenes, none of which are shot with any flash or style, but are edited with a propulsive pace and performed by a watchable cast enough to make them engaging.

Michell’s handling of the relationship between the two is touching in how little judgment he passes.

Exceptionally gorgeous and exceptionally silly.

About Time, inadvertently, reveals itself to be About Men, and how they devise lies in order to create the illusion that all women supposedly want to see.

About an hour in, if you haven’t walked over to the nearest stove and shoved your head inside, the sinking feeling sets in that you’re stuck with this unpleasant asshole.

The film is so po-faced that you wonder what the point of all this is, let alone what we should be hoping is the outcome. Struggling to bring gravity to the proceedings are Wakefield and Hinshaw, who give off the heat of two slabs of baloney slapped together.

It's unfortunate that commercial considerations seem to play into the third act, adding a more concrete representation of a very abstract idea.

Director Shaka King has made a film of big laughs and big heart that makes one long for one long green detour without pandering to the pot-hawks who, unrelatedly, also like the lowest-common-denominator appeal of most pot films without realizing they’re being patronized.

Washington’s performance is one of the best of the year, a high-wire act that is careful not to dip into survivalist caricature.

The Family is ultimately a headache, nearly two hours of baseball bat beatings and dull witticisms, with zero inventiveness or energy.

As an affecting romance between a woman caught between two worlds, it very nearly sticks the landing. As a showcase for Ms. Bosworth, never better, it's often sublime.

It's a film that plays equally to both sides of the political spectrum, and it feels like pandering either way.

It seems like a statement that Il Futuro presents simple but intriguing conflicts that nonetheless resolve anti-climactically, denying us an organic end.

A crude sketch of a film that could barely withstand a short-form, but instead has been stretched to agonizing feature length by directors Robert Wilson and Jason Lapeyre.

The intensity of Burdge’s excellent performance—and Fidell's intense, often claustrophobic filmmaking—carries the picture far, but when she turns away from the camera (and she does often), you can almost feel Fidell reaching for spare ideas.

Hell Baby works as a joke factory first and foremost, a collection of tropes (some mocked) second, and a movie a distant third.

Plummer adds another comfortably unreliable character to her gallery, turning Abigail into an older woman with a schoolboy crush.

The sloppy reveals of the third act can be seen from miles away, turning this into a low-impact actioner where characters are turned into chess pieces, and the narrative’s aim is to strategically assemble the parts like a play set.

For Scenic Route, it doesn’t seem to be the journey as much as the destination: seeing two sorta-friends wailing on each other feels like the shortcut a better movie never made.

Ultimately, the cumulative effect is deadening, just another chapter in an endless battle between overtasked and underpaid good guys, and cowardly baddies; the only real humanity in the film comes from Hudgens’ Cindy, who seems like a wild card of sorts, her character’s dimensions suggesting a world outside of the lurid details of this case. Refreshingly, she’s the only one in the film who refuses to be defined by the death and tragedy surrounding her.

The crime isn’t that Kick-Ass 2 is vulgar (which it is), but that it’s for so little gain.

The focus is spread too thinly on the various colorful local voices, all of whom openly campaign against Recchia’s intentions with zest and flavor.

The little action in 'Percy Jackson' wouldn’t be out-of-place in a superhero film, which is to say it’s mostly functional, and sometimes quite diverting.

As a movie, it’s quite an effects reel: Cockneys Vs. Zombies is a greatest hits package of your least demanding expectations given such a title.

There’s nothing about 2 Guns that doesn’t feel prefab, like someone poured a packet of Insta-Movie into a glass of water.

There’s a youthful energy running through Una Noche that threatens to overwhelm, from it’s sun-kissed first image to its final moments on the sands of the beach.

The endlessly surprising, often riotously funny Computer Chess basks in the details of a group of men who, at a key point in history, are asking themselves not only if they can accomplish something, but why, and what it means to their current generation.

This expensive misfire runs a little less than ninety minutes, which means that there’s likely a 105-110 minute long version that the producers hacked up in order to get the maximum amount of 3D showtimes to not embarrass the studio on opening weekend. Judging by the released product, that version is likely even worse, if such a thing were possible.

Even given the shapelessness of the picture, Hoback does the best he can in providing an imperfect timeline to a possibly worsening issue.

The Conjuring, at points, is terrifying. Wan really understands how active, acrobatic camerawork can enhance the storytelling without breaking the fourth wall, a technique abused by today’s horror craftsmen.

Director Mark Steven Johnson can’t seem to balance a tone here, which is a pity because for the most part he stands back and lets the two stars go at each other.

Basically, it’s a film made for brainless grunts who like to hang out all day making sub-literate jokes about boobs and gays while watching the game. No wonder the first movie was such a success.

It’s all very first draft, with a layer of supernatural permeating the events that suggests added attempts to connect three wildly disparate storylines.

One character dares to open up a debate about sex roles in the workplace; because he does so indelicately, Feig expects you to cheer when he takes a bullet to the head. To his credit, he is correct.

Directors Kramer, Miller and Newberger prefer embellishment, allowing personal stories about Downey to fuel animated re-enactments that trivialize rather than penetrate.

The Wall seems to be telling the story about assimilation, about a woman who accepts her lot and attempts to persevere through the cruelest of conditions, an unspoken martyr. Perhaps it would carry much more power had she not been so chatty.

Ultimately, American Mary simply reveals itself as a film with little on its mind, content to scare rubberneckers into contemplating the backstory of the more outlandish body manipulation jobs they’ve seen in public. A documentary would have sufficed.

The film progresses to the point where it feels less like father and son, and more like a young boy listening to an inspirational audiobook.

A couple of shootouts and chases are impressive, giving the film a little bit of momentum it sorely lacks, but it’s heartbreaking that ultimately the film doesn’t work.

Nancy, Please begins as a deadpan slacker comedy with existentialist undertones, and Will Rogers' Paul is a ball of unsettled twentysomething nerves. It's a subtle shift in Semans' first feature, both in tempo and in Rogers' performance, that we don't realize the film taking on a slightly more diabolical undertone.

Despite a lack of access to Manning and Assange, We Steal Secrets is a vital document of a pivotal moment in world history that we’re still experiencing as we speak.

The project seems compromised by a meager budget and limited scale.