Hunter Lanier

It’s the investigative portion of the movie that is most engaging.

The mundane is only as mundane as you make it, and the supernatural can be painfully mundane.

The ham-fisted approach undercuts the valuable information that makes up Fail State.

Aside from the poorly considered inclusion of staged drama, Framing John DeLorean competently breezes through the rise and fall of the legendary car mogul.

Drunk Bus, directed by Brandon Laganke and John Carlucci, is a deja-vu inducing coming-of-age story with enough character and good cheer to make you forgive how unadventurous it is.

It has a television movie quality to it as if it’s a dramatization of a newspaper article, rather than something cinematic.

Vice, written and directed by Adam McKay, plays straight to the cable-news generation of political enthusiasts. It’s depthless, has the attention span of a gopher, and is more concerned with appearances than getting to the root of anything.

With characters that we watch but never know and some imitative storytelling, Galveston can’t help but feel like a compilation of cover songs, which, while listenable, are stilted and perfunctory.

Despite the many things it does right, atmosphere and casting, mostly, it doesn’t give you any reason to remember it.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot isn’t the loony chuckle-fest that many might want and it’s not as affecting a character piece as Krzykowski might want, but it’s a crackpot showcase for a performer who deserves one or two, crackpot or otherwise.

Lying and Stealing comes across as the object a thief would replace an art piece to prevent anyone from realizing it’s missing at first glance.

Every now and then, a line or a subtle moment in someone’s performance has some truth in it, but little is sustained in Bullitt County.

Aaron Paul brings his trademark street-corner angst to the party, and it plays just fine. As child actors go, Murphy is pretty good. McNairy and Winstead do a fine job of realizing that silent, domestic agony that neither party wants to bring out into the open, fearing it won’t go back in.

Screenplays like A Dark Place only get made because they’re familiar. They present intrigue and drama in a way that doesn’t challenge the audience but reinforces their belief of what a movie like this should be. This conformist methodology might make the movie palatable—and marketable—but it doesn’t make it any good.

Putting it in the kindest possible terms, the movie could be passed off as an exercise in style. Because of this, it does manage to be watchable.

There are occasional moments of inspiration, stylistically and thematically, where the movie hints at its true potential. But most of the time, the movie is tripping over its desire to be noticed.