Inkoo Kang

A documentary that's admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure.

Grainily shot but radiating life, The Amazing Catfish is an enormously affecting portrait of a family in crisis that dares to hope.

First-time writer-director Jocelyn Towne takes an admirably novel stab at familial dysfunction in her father-daughter drama I Am I, but she proves unable to keep the film's originality from rapidly curdling into preposterousness.

If there isn't enough to feel, at least there's a lot to look at. Thanks to the superb 3-D direction by DeBlois, we swoop through the air, whoosh down dragons’ tails, and juuust baaaarely squeeze into small crevices, but still, those experiences are only like being on a really great rollercoaster — they don't mean anything.

First-time Spanish director Jorge Dorado aims for Hitchcock and misses by a mile with Anna.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

A few of the self-referential gags get recycled one too many times, but an exuberant buoyancy — and the belly-laugh-a-minute pacing of the jokes — makes 22 Jump Street a hilarious highpoint of an already quite funny summer season.

Director-star Livia De Paolis sets out to reassure everybody that the Internet won't destroy all relationships in her agreeable but unnecessary family drama Emoticon ;).

Garriga aims for depth in the third act, contextualizing religious conservatism as a reaction against the social revolutions of the 1960s. But the reduction of Christianity into just another political group feels like a dilution, a conversion of wine into water.

Blended director Frank Coraci, a Happy Madison vet, is too much of a company man to elevate this passion-phobic rom-com beyond something more than an above-average Sandler production.

The gratingly underdeveloped plot has all the dramatic effect of a toddler with her hands behind her back chirping, "Guess what I've got?" for more than an hour.

Personal or not, this lazy fantasy doesn't offer many more pleasures than an Instagram account.

What makes Neighbors exceptional, rather than merely great, is its successful attempt to reinvent the studio comedy.

Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin, this ostensible femme-powerment film is strangely unsympathetic, even demeaning, to its target audience. Rather than pandering to moms, this unfunny, unabashedly anti-feminist comedy consistently points out how wrong or unnecessary or ungrateful they are.

Wallace smartly leaves room for skeptics of Burpo's account to maintain their doubt; what matters most is that audiences understand the film character's reasons for choosing to believe his son's vision/dream/delirium.

Banks seems to hope that merely spending time with her subject will somehow create an illusion of intimacy. But her film's secretive opacity only makes Callahan a little prince, far away on his own planet.

Belle's extraordinary intelligence is most evident in its slow but satisfying disentanglement of the jumble of privileges and disadvantages that the wealthy, aristocratic, and learned — but also female, half-black, and pitifully sheltered — Dido embodies.

The invitingly loud Melendez posits herself as both a victimized failure and a triumphantly persevering pioneer, and though one can certainly be both, the film doesn't say anything new or meaningful about the industry she's been dying to join for the last two decades.

Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.

Despite its outstanding performances, The Quiet Ones remains the very thing its protagonist scoffs at: a pointless story about “evil begetting evil for the sake of evil.” Evil can be defeated, but emptiness always prevails.

The parkour is breathtaking and the plot twists are off-the-charts ridiculous.

Shot in '70s naturalism, the film's cinematography only invites unfavorable comparisons to the more ambitious, psychologically searching interpersonal dramas of that era.

The virgin-whore dichotomy between the two female characters flattens the film into something much less interesting than it could have been, and the tonal discrepancies occasionally threaten to take it into experimental territory.

Potrykus offers a variety of intriguing suggestions about the relationship between laughter and violence, performance and destruction.

It's time to return this old painting to the attic.

Its core dance styles are a wonderfully frenetic fusion of tap and hip-hop and a truly novel blend of Japanese taiko drumming and K-pop girl-group choreography. Whenever actor Derek Hough and BoA stop leaping and twirling, though, Make Your Move is an underwritten mess.

Whatever Proxy lacks in narrative cohesion and psychological realism, it makes up for in its compelling fever-dream quality and its probing questions about the darker side of parenting.