Jeannette Catsoulis

Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.

Knowing but never jaded, Hollywood Dreams is driven by Ms. Frederick's no-boundaries commitment to her broken character, a performance that's as startling as it is touching. In Mr. Jaglom's maverick hands, the appeal of illusion over reality is both fatal and irresistible.

What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.

An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.

Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, Blood on Her Name packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes.

The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.

Mixes method and madness to chart the evolution of a counterculture phenomenon.

With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding.

It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.

This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.

Like a feature-length version of the television sitcom “My Name Is Earl,” only Canadian -- and not funny.

Relies less on the novelty of its premise than on the positioning of solid actors in minor roles (including Melissa Leo and Martin Donovan as the tortured parents of a murdered child) and the intelligence of its star.

Harks back to the drive-in classics of yesteryear with unapologetic nostalgia and undisguised affection.

A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, Stolen Seas can't resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of Somali piracy really needs to settle down.

Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.

While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.

It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.

A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.

In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.

Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."

This brisk reimagining of the 1984 slasher "Silent Night, Deadly Night" delivers the seasonal goods with admirable efficiency and not a little wit.

A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.

An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.

Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.