Jeannette Catsoulis

This collection of eight mini-sermons falls flat.

Assassination has sprinkles of wit and a nicely restrained anchor in Lee Jung-jae.

A movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.

Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.

Striving to dramatize a real-life battle that occurred in 2002 near Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, the writer and director, Kim Hak-soon, stirs corn and cliché into a paean to patriotism.

A damp-eyed comedy whose banal title isn’t the only thing needing improvement.

Marveling without questioning, the movie is content to package the phenomenon and coast on its feel-good wave. Yet, somewhere around the midpoint, I began to wonder who was most thrilled by all this fuss.

Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it’s Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.

Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.

Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.

Ms. Basinger commits to her disturbed character. But the script (by the director, Anders Morgenthaler) makes Maria’s behavior so reckless — at times, she’s practically begging to be mugged or worse — that we have no chance of sympathizing with her.

Wrapping an existential question in the random rhythms of the road movie, Doomsdays comes at you sideways, its melancholy catching you off guard.

Unspooling with an angry intensity and without a single sympathetic character, “Unfreedom” (originally titled “Blemished Light”) is a hard-line thriller derailed by messy editing and narrative silliness.

Stretched to 80 minutes, the story (by the director Leah Meyerhoff) almost breaks; that it holds together without compromising its simplicity or emotional authenticity only proves that, contrary to the maxim, you don’t need a gun if you’ve got the right girl.

Offering few solutions beyond a single fair-trade fashion company, The True Cost — whose serene interludes compete with sickening recordings of Black Friday shopping riots and so-called clothing haul videos — stirs and saddens. Not least because it’s unlikely to reach the young consumers most in need of its revelations.

Communicating much with very little, Guidelines (“La Marche à Suivre”) presents a profoundly hopeful view of education as a civilizing force and a haven for transformation. There have been many more eventful high school movies, but rarely one that’s more absorbed in the forming of adults and the shaping of citizens.

The conclusion is rushed and poorly staged, yet the damp caul of loneliness that envelops the film’s early scenes feels moving and true.

A caldron of unspeakable acts and unpalatable language, The Human Centipede 3 takes the bottom-feeding standards of its previous chapters (released in 2010 and 2011) to new lows of debasement.

This disordered portrait seems heavily influenced by its equally jumbled setting.

Fetishizing the tired tokens of the American gangster movie, The Connection is a slickly styled, overlong pastiche. Yet its denizens have a retro glamour and the soundtrack a shameless literalness that’s rather endearing.

Proceeding with a strained quirkiness that infects much more than the names of its main characters, this first feature by Justin Reardon is a paean to the kind of narcissism that sucks the air out of every scene.

Though based on a remarkable true story, this clichéd tear-jerker is barely interested in Marguerite’s revolutionary teaching methods, focusing instead on the intensity of her connection to Marie.

Maintaining a sunny, scrubbed-clean tone, Ms. Hencken allows no possibility of dazed groupies or drunken meltdowns — and only the briefest whiff of cocaine — to darken her portrait.

Mr. Arcady’s reliance on heavy-handed melodrama, on screaming women and on worried-looking men, winds everything so tightly that the anguish plateaus and the characters begin to seem like chess pieces in an argument.

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.

Tiny advances in seduction — like a direct gaze, or the eventual removal of that wig — assume the power of full-on sexual collisions, and Ms. Yaron, with her restlessly darting eyes, easily conveys Meira’s sensual deprivation.

Falling back repeatedly on in-your-face symbolism — especially with regard to the specter of decline — Mr. Salvadori seems content to idle in neutral.

There may be little to give you the collywobbles, but there’s quite a lot to enjoy, with Ms. Morton heading the list. Swaddled in thick cardis and shapeless scrubs, she makes Katherine a well of overanxious care and castrating comments.

The light is menacing, the mood watchful and the action scenes have a crude, desperate energy that gets the job done. Here, violence is neither weightless nor glorified, but just another obstacle on the way to a better future.

A modern-day noir weighed down by redundant narration and a forced plot, The Girl Is in Trouble feels like a tug of war between the actors, who understand the need for lightness, and dialogue that emerges in expository clots.

A frustratingly fragmented yet warmly intimate portrait of an evolving bond that frays but doesn’t sever.

A tiny, piercing study of dawning desperation that’s all the more remarkable for being virtually silent.

A movie singularly lacking in rock-doc unpredictability and verve.

These drifting, unresolved stories may lack dramatic punch, but Mr. Nikolic, who teaches film at the New School, draws lovely performances from his cosmopolitan cast and oodles of atmosphere from a spare piano-and-strings soundtrack.

The swings from goofy to gory and jokey to tragic cancel one another out, and Mr. Diliberto’s near-constant voice-over is irksome. As is the pivotal romance.

Directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom have produced a jaunty, jovial portrait with a surprising sting in its tail.

Balancing its abstract storytelling with commanding visuals (by the gifted cinematographer Ali Olcay Gözkaya), Futuro Beach explores liberation and reinvention, the tug of familiarity versus the allure of the foreign.

Ornamenting its flimsy back story with assaultive sound effects and asinine behavior, Out of the Dark strains to shock.

Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.

Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.

This weird and witty spoof filters the routines of the living through the lens of the long dead.

Placing sex and gender identity at the center of almost every conversation, the writer and director, Eric Schaeffer, is so keen to demythologize that the film’s potentially most affecting moments are too often smothered by the hackneyed characters and setups that surround them.

None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.

The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.

This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.

Feeding over-the-top language to underdeveloped characters, Deon Taylor’s Supremacy dramatizes racism with an unvarying intensity that quickly becomes wearing.

A shallow commentary on how an artist’s talent can be subsumed by the desire for fame and fortune. Or maybe just by the need to make a movie.

Written and directed by Sean Mullin, a comedian and onetime Army officer (he plays a comic in the film), Amira & Sam is more successful as a portrait of veteran alienation than as a romance.

The writing is so poor and the visual embellishments so few that some of the violence, like the frequent attacks on the base by local villagers, make little sense.

Heartfelt but enervated, Song One noodles around the Brooklyn music scene without stirring up magic.

Against the Sun is a groaningly tedious survival story that will at least leave you with a renewed commitment to wearing sunscreen.

At heart a repulsive slash-and-bash with philosophical pretensions, Killers is classed up considerably by strong acting, a multi-strand plot and a tone that’s both nihilistic and mournful.

Evidencing more bullets than brains, Vice — a bit of ephemeral science-fiction twaddle directed by Brian A. Miller — has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.

Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.

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.

Yael Reuveny’s Farewell Herr Schwarz traces a Holocaust mystery with stumbling curiosity and endearing sincerity.

Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.

Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.

Despite Mr. Stormare’s valiant efforts, “Dark Summer” (directed by Paul Solet) feels listlessly plotted and insipidly performed.

Song of the Sea moves delicately but purposefully from pain to contentment and from anger to love. On land and underwater, the siblings’ adventures unfold in hand-drawn, painterly frames of misty pastels, sometimes encircled by cobwebby borders that give them the look of pictures in a locket.

Rising above a minuscule budget with ladles of charm and a tender poignancy, Little Feet is a quixotic poem to youthful resourcefulness.

The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.

Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.

Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.

This emphatic and empathetic documentary (directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker) presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery.

The plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike.

A kooky, affectionate tribute that’s happily superficial.

Rather than present an evenhanded assessment of the issues at stake, the director, Todd Darling, is so busy fist-pumping for urban farming — and so dazzled by his granola heroes — that naysayers must be demeaned and denigrated.

Bathed in a nostalgic glow that just avoids maudlin, the group’s problems — a sexless marriage, an unexpected job loss — bark but don’t bite. Scenes flirt with cliché, yet the writing has spark.

[A] sneakily compelling documentary.

Silly beyond words, Wolves is indifferently acted and unconvincingly realized.

Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.

Saving most of its special-effects pennies until the final five minutes, Hangar 10 struggles to build a science-fiction movie from little more than a ghost of an idea and an infamous location.

Unevenly directed by Isaac Feder, Sex Ed droops.

Showcasing the best and the worst in human nature, Orlando von Einsiedel’s devastating documentary “Virunga” wrenches a startlingly lucid narrative from a sickening web of bribery, corruption and violence.

Rough-hewed but naturally inspirational, True Son gains heft from its portrait of a city sharply segregated by race and income.

With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.

A blue collar poem threaded with old-timer memories and present-day pain, Braddock America pays bittersweet tribute to a once-thriving Pennsylvania steel town and those who stuck around to bear witness to its decline.

This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.

Featuring the usual fractured visuals, generic victims and pinballing cameras — both hand-held and mounted on bike helmets — Exists nevertheless has an unusually dreamy opening and a few surprisingly entertaining tweaks.

Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.

A documentary that purports to chronicle the sober and urgent work of those who ferret out human-rights abuses, but instead plays like a portrait of a rather glamorous marriage.

This spare but potent melodrama revels in the desiccated landscapes provided by South Africa and photographed with dusty purity by Giles Nuttgens. Through his lens, the spectrum of sunbaked skin and parched dunes is as rich as any rainbow.

the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.

Ms. Weisman offers a deluge of information. But for those not already versed in the lingo or the people involved, the movie plays like a blurry primer to an anarchic, mysterious world.

Raising significant questions about the psychological effects of poverty on young children, this unsettlingly direct stab at atonement feels genuine.

If the movie’s hilariously cruel treatment of the halt and the lame upsets you, you can enjoy the crisp cinematography, operatically repulsive effects and frequently witty dialogue.

Soft in tone and muted in color, Waiting for August is a child’s-eye view of one family — among many in today’s Romanian economy — rising to the challenge of living without parents.

A blue-collar meditation on the meaning of community and the imperative of compassion, one that endures even as an unexpectedly prurient drama unfolds at its center.

Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.

Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.

The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.

The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.

The film’s congeniality, however, in no way dulls its humor or the sharpness of its observations.

If the twisty finale underwhelms, Mr. Carreté’s enigmatic style and textured images offer their own doomy rewards.

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

The result is so out there that you can imagine Mr. Smith and his collaborators rolling in the aisles at their own preposterousness. If you can find your inner 16-year-old, you might just join them.

A lean, low-budget debut that taps into newlywed anxiety with subtle wit and no small amount of style.

Burdened by a ludicrous script and messy direction, Ms. Kirkland — a headstrong veteran performer who is nothing if not game — has proved that she can play this kind of role in her sleep. If only the movie around it were worthy of her efforts.

A singularly focused and avant-garde talent, Ms. Streb bends the messy rush of risk to her indomitable will.

The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.

Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.

The story is unremarkable, but its execution zings.

Hilary Brougher’s Innocence (based on Jane Mendelsohn’s 2000 novel) moves to the formulaic beats of the second-rate TV movie, albeit one cloaked in an ultra-glossy sheen.

This quivering effort from the director John Erick Dowdle only increases in impenetrability whenever anything mildly curious occurs.

Temperate in tone but screaming with subtext, Jamie Marks Is Dead climbs above the current glut of supernaturally inclined entertainment by dint of a hushed unease that permeates almost every frame.

The music is lovely, and the animation is soft and imaginatively detailed. Patema and Age may not know what’s upside down or right-way up, but their director is never in any doubt.

Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.

Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.

A fascinating profile of the online pornography provider Kink.com.

The best antidote to all the glowering and posing is Eva Green: As Ava, the titular dame, she’s nothing short of a godsend.

The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.

For all its enthusiastic vulgarity and truly terrible punk rock, We Are Mari Pepa is a gently endearing portrait of four amiable Mexican teenagers feeling their way toward adulthood.

Dinosaur 13 may not be the best documentary, but as a scientific soap opera, it’s a doozy.

Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.

Proceeding in a tone of unrelieved misery, Coldwater is a punishing, predictable drama that’s almost rescued by strong acting and good intentions.

Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.

A balloon of cuteness that makes you yearn for a pin, What If is Saturday night comfort food for those who need to believe that even the most curdled among us can find a mate.

James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.

The Almost Man may be slight, but how many films can pack equal amounts of emotional nuance and inappropriately sprayed urine into just 75 minutes?

Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.

Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.

Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.

Unfocused and repetitive, this feature-length commercial by Jeremy Snead uses a muddled timeline and bargain basement graphics to produce a horn-tooting, “Aren’t games awesome?” tone.

Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.

Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.

The film’s loose naturalism and strong acting — Chris Browning, as a liaison between the F.B.I. and the reservation, is especially enjoyable — are slyly seductive.

Mr. Khan displays a strong visual sense that makes pivotal scenes pop. The unlikely ending strains credulity, but what this confident debut lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in execution.

Working with grace and patience, Mr. Fernández makes the mundane captivating.

This low-budget debut by Joshua Overbay cooks a surprising amount of tension from the barest minimum of ingredients.

Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.

Swiveling from past to present and back again, the writer and director, Lee Su-jin, drops ominous clues — a bruised boy; a mysterious infection — that only slowly coalesce into a larger tragedy.

Pitting good against evil with striking intelligence and a near-operatic commitment to extreme suffering, Ms. Gebbe neither mocks nor celebrates Tore’s love for his God. Neither does she give any hint that it’s reciprocated.

This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.

Moving and maddening in almost equal measure, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a devastating meditation on what can happen when a prescient thinker challenges corporate interests and the power of the state.

Slicing through the fat of policy debates to the visceral rush of critical care, the narrative combines existential worries... and blood-and-guts immediacy with a seamlessness that made me want to high-five the editor, Joshua Altman.

There’s a stillness to the filmmaking, coupled with Saunder Jurriaans and David Bensi’s truly lovely original score, that lends specific shots... a near-heartbreaking melancholy.

Shot with a camera as excited as a squirrel-chasing dog, Cheerleaders has a girls-gone-wild energy and a twisted sense of humor.

Its violence is low-tech... and its look is old-school, but its message could not possibly be more momentous.

Charmingly slight and casually confessional.

Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.

Mr. Goldthwait exercises so much caution that you want to get behind his characters and push.

This gentle comedy, while entirely unmemorable, releases a genuine warmth that deflects harsh judgment. It doesn’t, however, excuse characters that are little more than props for embarrassing fashion or delivery systems for dated slang.

Even more inadvisable was the decision (whether made by Mr. McLean or his backers) to transform the mercurial psychopath Mick Taylor (a truly menacing John Jarratt) into a roguish cartoon.

Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.

Empathetic and nosy, Ms. Ben-Ari is no unequivocal cheerleader for breast over bottle: If anything, her subjects’ time-consuming struggles and evident exhaustion could put a damper on the natural-feeding plans of the most sanguine new parent. Yet the film isn’t a downer.

A tantalizing glimpse of a determinedly outsider talent.

If we brush aside the unanswered questions, what we’re left with is a simple tale of two men: One who may have been lost, and one who only felt that way.

As cavalier with structure as ever, Mr. Jaglom surrounds himself with familiars who embrace his cheery, disorderly style.

A biting, sometimes droll look at the allure of humiliation, Ape appears simple, but its underlying machinery is joltingly clever.

Amid a cacophony of accusations and justifications, it’s the children’s broken limbs, ladderlike scars and disfigured, emaciated bodies that paradoxically hold the film together.

Mr. Nooshin stirs a mystery that’s light on special effects and bravely uncomplicated. He may not have much money, but his feel for age and class dynamics is sure, and his actors respond.

Stingy with details and dialogue, but more than generous with atmosphere, this seductively photographed thriller (written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who also wielded the camera) sells its empty calories with great skill.

Employing scaled-down sets and low-budget audacity, Mr. Parker, an intelligent and boundary-testing filmmaker, proves less concerned with logic than with how far he can push his characters.

This wonderfully weird documentary pinpoints the desire to preserve fleeting glories.

13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.

Preachy and pretty, Heaven is a classy-looking product with a vanilla flavor and a pastel palette.

Dignified to a fault and crammed with historical worthies (like a pre-deportation Emma Goldman), this dry tour of union hall strife and kitchen table sentiment wears its sympathies proudly.

A tropical tornado of cadmium and cobalt, magenta and marigold, Carlos Saldanha’s frantic follow-up to his well-received 2011 animated feature, “Rio,” ups the ante on sound and movement but pays scant attention to story.

Sweet, funny and ultimately rather touching.

Matty Beckerman’s Alien Abduction repackages ancient legend for modern audiences in a found-footage story of streamlined efficiency.

Always arresting and sometimes troubling, Watermark — aside from the odd comment here and there — neither lectures nor argues.

Even if we can get past unlikely details (like a mental institution that allows patients to play with scissors), the drab locations and dull performances suck the air out of a story (by Mr. Irving and Rick Santos) that’s every bit as troubled as its unappealing heroine.

Sharp yet overdetermined, Blumenthal doesn’t breathe naturally — it’s a comedy in a box. Just not a box that everyone will want to open.

A tale of two brothers, one band and a boatload of psychological baggage, Mistaken for Strangers is, like its maker, scruffy, undisciplined and eager to be loved. The big surprise is how easy it is to comply.

Vividly painting Queens in the early 1990s as a landscape of crack and graffiti, the filmmakers go on to smother any menace with a swoony-upbeat soundtrack and an “oh, those kooky kids” tone.

It’s a poorly acted grab bag of shopworn ideas and hyperbolic behaviors that not even Ryan Murphy could translate into entertainment.

Cheerfully partial and unapologetically deferential to its subject’s operatic self-promotion, Jodorowsky’s Dune makes you wish that he had scraped together the final $5 million needed, we are told, to realize his dream.

A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.

However good the intentions, this sluggish documentary about the stigma of substance abuse and the barriers to recovery never comes close to catching fire.

These confrontational comedians — however serious the message, it’s always imparted with liberal dollops of humor — are experts at merging shock and showmanship.

Sadly, the only thing audiences are likely to find horrific is the acting. Or the possibility that any of these people might make another movie.

Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.

The shocks are short and sharp, the acting is strongest where it counts, and the director of photography, Adam Marsden, washes everything in a swampy green that makes spooks pop.

Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.

Economical in the extreme — but without appearing cash-poor — this tightly wound thriller proves that minimal resources can sometimes produce more than satisfying results.

Jay Alaimo’s sour tale of suburban greed and marital disappointment, can’t even deliver a temporary high; mired in the blahs, the blues and the midlife crazies, this poor man’s “American Beauty” slowly sucks your will to live.

At once comic, tragic and goofily romantic, and resting too often on Odd’s clarifying narration, this young-adult lark breaches the nonsense barrier with some regularity.

Carefully assembled and soberly presented, Robert May’s Kids for Cash takes a lacerating look at America’s juvenile justice system.

In this blood-splattered wasteland, neither original ideas nor acting skills flourish.

Taking a credibility-straining premise and running with it, the Dutch director Arne Toonen gives Black Out way more energy than sense. Luckily, his antihero, Jos (Raymond Thiry), lacks neither.

The film embraces humor — would you want a one-legged man guiding you through a minefield? — without surrendering sensitivity. The screenplay may echo with atrocities, but it’s not consumed by them.

Robert Nathan’s Lucky Bastard is a sorry-looking found-footage thriller as unconvincing as its characters’ thrashing orgasms.

Like a fresh ripple in the near-stagnant high school movie pool, Chris Nelson’s Date and Switch balances formula with winning performers, genuine humor and a generosity of spirit that this genre too often lacks.

Ms. Richen elucidates an entire spectrum of views, from actively egalitarian to reactively homophobic.

This setup is simple, but what follows is less so: an impressionistic battle between imagination and brute force that too often veers from enlightening to exasperating.

This sickly sweet concoction sets your teeth on edge.

The filmmakers stage an amazing race that almost absolves an overstuffed plot and an over-reliance on coincidence.

It’s all just so much empty eye candy.

The whole enterprise rests on Ms. Gilsig, who plays Anna with a subtlety rarely required of her crazypants girlfriend on “Nip/Tuck” or her clingy spouse on “Glee.”

But instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that’s riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.

This challenging and mesmerizing documentary captures horror and joy with the same gorgeous dispassion.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett direct with competence but a dispiriting lack of originality.

Before our eyes, Laura’s lengthening limbs and deepening introspection become the point of a movie that begins with a child and ends with a young woman.

In lieu of tension, the film is stuffed with crazed musical crescendos, amateurish structural feints and pregnant pauses that cry out for the familiar “chu-CHUNG” of a “Law & Order” scene change.

When I Saw You is a soft-centered child’s-eye view of alienation, toughened by fine acting (Saleh Bakri shines as a fighter drawn to Ghaydaa) and Hélène Louvart’s full-bodied photography.

Adopting an appealingly low-key approach to a high-stakes subject, this gently observant drama from Geoff Marslett takes its sweet time introducing the girl to the gun, but when it does, we’re all but guaranteed to care.

Mr. Kaufman’s talent can be debated, but his love for his job is stamped on every garish, oozy frame.

Filled with sappy dialogue and screeching strings, Truth is a puerile excavation of secrets and sickness.

The film never finds its dramatic footing. Nor, sadly, its common sense.

Messy in parts and at least 15 minutes too long, Personal Tailor is also cunningly acted and lushly photographed (by Zhao Xiaoshi) in dazzling candy-bright colors.

A documentary that presents the sexual exploitation of young women as a systemic cancer that feeds on public misconception as much as male appetites.

Too slight to persuade, The Unbelievers is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this.

A muddled supernatural thriller that fails to capitalize on either its horrific prologue or eerie location.

Trying to gather too much into his net, Mr. Stewart gets a little lost, but his bottom line could not be clearer: When the oceans die, so do we.

For all the shooting, knifing and nattering about sleeper cells, the film feels weirdly static and terminally tired.

Mr. Clark finds unexpected heart amid cliché and frigidity.

Though the developing bond between the two men — one of whom is virtually nonverbal — is credible and even touching, the storytelling is too oblique to reel you in.

It’s a vintage flashbulb moment of two men at the peak of their talents, one on his way to securing his second world championship, and the other between the twin triumphs of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.”

As artificial as the inseminations it celebrates, Delivery Man is a soggy comedy more focused on stimulating your tear ducts than your funny bone.

Lion Ark, a spunky account of a perilous rescue mission, has a ragtag rhythm that befits the mercurial behavior of its hulking furry stars.

Respectful and thorough, this unembellished true-crime story might have only regional appeal, but its depressing reminder of our failure to prevent similar calamities will resonate nationwide.

Some predictable plot turns aren’t as damaging as they could be, thanks to solid acting (there isn’t a weak performance in the bunch) and lead characters with distinct personalities and motivations.

A painfully gauche, galumphing attack on factory farming, meat eating, animal experimentation and human supremacy.

Interweaving Inuit life today with re-enactments of the culture 100 years ago, People of a Feather warmly portrays a cold, uncertain present and a worrying future.

As sun-dappled infatuation abruptly crashes into post-apocalyptic survival, Mr. Macdonald struggles to balance a nebulous narrative on tentpole moments of rich emotional resonance.

A mournful Midwestern ballad devoid of grace notes.

The battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.

Merging the sustainability worries of guitar enthusiasts and environmentalists with the hard-cash concerns of logging corporations and Native American land developers, Maxine Trump’s thoughtful documentary wrests clarity from complexity.

One of those projects whose very existence should baffle anyone hardy enough to endure all 94 minutes.

Encouraging sensitive performances that mitigate the film’s sluggish pace and fuzzy narrative, Ms. Szumowska juxtaposes two-person scenes of wordless intimacy with group expressions of casual violence.

Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.

Mr. Banker teases us with a dizzy, dislocating shooting style that throws up a succession of eerily arresting images. Even so, his film never overcomes the fact that watching drugged-out wastrels is rarely interesting — unless, of course, you’re one of them.

The film’s questionable continuity, bargain-basement effects and overload of gay clichés may not be to everyone’s taste, but its queer-eye-for-the-undead-guy exuberance and warmth of spirit are irresistible.

A mildly engaging lowlife odyssey that struggles not to choke on its own style.

Slowly uncovering the prejudices that calamity can unleash, Michael Richter’s screenplay lays bare the damage wrought by Sept. 11 while deftly dodging hysteria, wondering how we differentiate between innocent teenage behaviors and dangerous red flags.

Like much of Ms. Cody’s work, Paradise plays out in quippy sound bites, only this time they feel entirely unsuited to Lamb’s sheltered background.

Has plenty of humor but no satirical bite.

A searing look at the role of American evangelical missionaries in the persecution of gay Africans, Roger Ross Williams’s God Loves Uganda approaches this intersection of faith and politics with some fairness and a good deal of outrage.

Infused with an infectious love for its subject, Symphony of the Soil presents a wondrous world of critters and bacteria, mulch and manure.

This fiasco from the writer and director Mark Edwin Robinson will persuade you that the title refers not to a place without light (though there’s precious little) but to a story without reason.

What could have been a very funny short film about self-control and befriending your id instead becomes a rambling commentary on father-son dysfunction and the limits of proctology.

Predictable musical montages fail to deflate an exceptionally subtle script (by Mr. Vallely) and Ms. Ynoa’s astonishingly mature, hard-to-pin-down performance.

Mr. Porterfield might sometimes be too subtle for his own good, but by taking us on a low-key ramble through the ever-shifting feelings of a fractured family, he has woven a dreamy, detached chronicle of dissolution and renewal.

Remarkable as much for its insights as for its audacity, The Dirties approaches school violence with a comic veneer that slowly shades into deep darkness.

The Citizen is a heartfelt plea for charity, tolerance and all-around loving kindness — admirable aims sadly shackled to Sam Kadi’s inexpert direction.

That space between reality and mirage is where Ms. de Van’s strength, and this movie’s true horror, lies.

It’s all a little silly, but Mr. Mickle’s restrained gravity stifles the impulse to laugh.

Even at its most incomprehensible, the propulsive thriller On the Job is never less than arresting.

In grabbing for the heart this one-size-fits-all fable sadly ignores the mind.

The movie’s boldness and horrifying logic get under your skin.

Despite smatterings of wit and a stable of skilled performers, C.O.G. struggles to find a consistent tone, its episodic structure veering from farcical to poignant to dangerously raw.

A noncommittal, occasionally surreal portrait of hardscrabble lives and omnipresent risk.

Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.

To the informed consumer hoping for greater elucidation, Mr. Seifert’s partisan, oversimplified survey falls short.

A mess from start to finish — though, judging by the ending, this story won’t be over any time soon — Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name.

Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.

Ms. Scherson’s style — backed wholeheartedly by the cool cinematography of Ricardo de Angelis — may value mood over information, but it’s the perfect vehicle for a portrait of two damaged souls grasping for a security they no longer possess.

The romance may be risible, but the scenes of mass panic and political desperation are slickly disturbing.

[A] regrettably hokey first feature from Bryan Anthony Ramirez.

A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.

Mr. Buschel, armed with an ear for diverting dialogue and actors who know how to sell it, somehow makes it all work.

Adam Wingard’s You’re Next strays just enough from formula to tweak our jaded appetites. That it does so without spraying the gore to geyserlike excess says a great deal about Mr. Wingard’s sensibility.

Too much of the film feels like shorthand, a trail of teasing crumbs to lead us to the inevitable sequels.

The actors are so relaxed and personable that the film’s occasional glibness — and its over-reliance on coincidence to further the cross-pollinating narrative — is easy to let slide.

Grim, intelligent and vividly photographed by the director’s father, Philippe Lavalette, Inch’Allah works best when the camera alights on Ava and Rand, whose marvelously mobile faces convey all the complexity that Chloe lacks.