Jeannette Catsoulis

The film produces moments that catch in the throat.

Dark, airless and packed with psychological hurt that seems to spring from nowhere, this angry morality play, tucked inside a police procedural, suffers from a crippling lack of back story and characters whose relationships are fraught with unexplained complexity.

Though not without substance, National Security is marred by writing that’s not nearly as creative as the torments it portrays.

This poor-surfers-make-good drama from Morgan O’Neill and Ben Nott relies more than it should on toned thighs and taut gluteals. Be grateful; there’s nothing to see on dry land that’s anywhere near as compelling.

As subtle as its title, Cockneys vs. Zombies is mildly funny and easily likable.

Banishing showy effects and cheap scares, the Ecuadorean director Sebastián Cordero has meticulously shaped a number of sci-fi clichés — from the botched spacewalk to the communications breakdown — into a wondering contemplation of our place in the universe.

The undisciplined shooting style and underdeveloped script confound the actors at every turn. Despite their best efforts, they never overcome the limitations of a movie more intent on cutting corners than fleshing out a story.

An exhaustingly pretentious heave of artistic self-involvement, The Time Being takes an exceptionally handsome journey to nowhere at all.

The approach is cheerfully candid and the humor often sly... Yet this midlife confessional could have reached beyond the maternal cravings of highly educated, urban-dwelling singletons had it plumbed people’s heads as thoroughly as Ms. Davenport’s birth canal.

A little wan but a lot likable, Gustavo Ron’s Ways to Live Forever is a forthright and surprisingly buoyant drama about facing death before you have really lived.

Big Words is an engrossing, coming-of-middle-age drama that shows how disappointment can fester and derail a life. By the end, hope and change seem possible but far from guaranteed.

Neither suspenseful nor even comprehensible, John Swetnam’s dashed-off script (carelessly directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi) throws up plenty of red herrings — and a stupendously idiotic ending — but not a single character worth caring about.

Unapologetically designed both to inform and affect, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s delicately lacerating documentary, Blackfish, uses the tragic tale of a single whale and his human victims as the backbone of a hypercritical investigation into the marine-park giant SeaWorld Entertainment.

The title of Terms and Conditions May Apply is unlikely to excite, but the content of this quietly blistering documentary should rile even the most passive viewer.

Using mostly amateur performers and improvised dialogue, Mr. Silver has created a profoundly awkward riff on dysfunction that’s uneventful but not unrewarding.

Cool and cerebral, Apparition stubbornly resists our desire to connect with its troubled characters... Even so, the film’s sophistication creates space for us to ponder deeper, unanswered questions.

Mundane conversations and outings drag on while the central mystery takes baby steps forward, suggesting that a shorter running time or a more developed script might have better served the originality of the premise.

Whether viewed as empowerment tools or aphrodisiacs, stress relievers or deadly bodyguards, these weapons and their owners never cohere into an actual point.

This fairly rote tale of rural ghouls and their passing-through prey has its own hick charm, mostly because of performers who never overplay their hands.

A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.

This pull-no-punches portrait shocks and amuses with equal frequency.

It’s all a bit precious and predictable.

Cinematographer Du Jie delivers moments of visual ecstasy that almost make us forget that they’re framing a reckless cipher.

Pointing at everything and elucidating nothing, Hello Herman arrives freighted with the anti-bullying agenda of its director, Michelle Danner.

It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent.

A Pan-Asian romantic melodrama that virtually pokes you in the eye with its fakery.

Viewed solely as a string of action sequences, Erased delivers the kind of dryly efficient, wearyingly familiar entertainment that already clogs too many of our movie screens.

Wisely deciding to refrain from rapping our knuckles with greenhouse gas statistics and Al Gore-style pie charts, the filmmakers fashion a portrait of a conscience spurred to action by an unexpected opportunity.

Morally cunning and with a tone as black as pitch, Pieta, the 18th film from the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, is a deeply unnerving revenge movie in which redemption is dangled like a cat toy before a cougar.

Raw and resolute, this unsettling fable feels driven by an anger that remains largely unexpressed.

The Girls in the Band is everything a worthwhile documentary should be, and then some: engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters.

Mr. Kitamura, an action enthusiast who prefers to show rather than tell, seems unaware that the film’s dialogue is laughable, its characters unfathomable and the acting often less than optimal.

The violence is quick and occasionally inventive, with little of the attenuated nastiness that characterizes so many genre pictures, and the photography ranges from brightly sun-kissed to down-and-dirty.

Three Sisters documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country’s unfortunates never seems to wane.

The film’s small group of primary characters slips from joy to fury to murderous suspicion with faultless fluidity.

Pathetically inept.

The women share their dreams, their thoughts on relationships and some of the hazards of their work. The serious, thoughtful responses carry the film.

More focused on philosophy then feeding, “Kiss” marries a mash-up of undead clichés (I know, let’s have another lingering shot of the moon!) to hilariously stilted conversations.

A slight yet profound exploration of generational choices and our fear of living our parents’ lives.

Unearthing a decent sample of these former members, as well as a wealth of archival film and photographs, the directors elicit testimony that’s diversely sharp, spacey, nostalgic and heartbreaking.

This confident first feature from the actor Amy Seimetz is much more invested in atmosphere than in plot.

A warm thank you to those whose work is mostly invisible and entirely necessary.

This dreary spy drama is as flat and airless as the concrete bunker in which it unfolds.

Even while embracing the breathless beats of the crime thriller, Graceland holds tight to its concern for exploited children.

Oconomowoc has one thing going for it: a running time of just 79 minutes, even if every one of them feels like an eternity.

Disconnect is naturally gripping. Using unforgiving closeups, Rubin pokes into unexpected corners— not least the different ways in which men and women respond to calamity — and never forces his story's social-media scares to improbable heights.

Were it not for the charming Patrick Bruel as a no-nonsense security expert and Alice’s unlikely suitor, this spun-sugar concoction would be well nigh unwatchable.

Smartly incorporating Sasa Zivkovic’s sweet and simple animation, as well as an exhilarating, punk-infused soundtrack, Mr. Persiel extends the film’s appeal beyond hard-core skaters.

Shot with some wit and considerable speed, its short, sharp beatdowns are a refreshing change from the bloated action sequences favored by some of Mr. Kang’s genre contemporaries.

This witty first feature is a flawed but diverting meditation on finding inspiration while losing your soul.

Though the film’s ice-cold blend of the cerebral and the atavistic can be off-putting, it enables a queasy portrait of moral disengagement that lingers long after Simon has slipped from the screen.

An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust.

Something unexpectedly profound emerges from the flimsiest of stories in Stranger Things, a drama so modest and trusting of its two leads that any directing flourishes might have shattered its spell.

At times the groan and scream of collapsing metal sounds so authentic you might mistake Jackson’s heavy breathing for your own.

Kim Chapiron, proves an excellent choreographer of brutality...But without a strong political point (unlike its source material), Dog Pound feels hollow and hopeless.

Mr. Wood has created a poignant portrait of an artist unable to escape the stamp of her class or the burdens of aging.

Stripped down and edited for disequilibrium rather than clarity, “Play” is less interested in pandering to gorehounds than in highlighting our reluctance to view children as anything other than innocent.

New World is both less bloody and more thoughtful than most of its genre, the shifting-alliances plot becoming more engrossing as it progresses.

Nuances of faith, politics and sexual identity enrich what initially presents as a classic good son-bad son tale.

Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.

Cheerless and voyeuristic, Clip (which was banned in Russia) seems a sincere attempt to portray a lost and disaffected generation. But the film’s brutally honest parade of callous behavior and casual, almost cruel sex has a depressing prurience that wears you down.

To borrow RuPaul’s delightful catchphrase, the only possible response to a project like this is to advise it to “sashay away.”

This Lithuanian love story from Kristina Buozyte offers a discomfiting blend of visual ecstasy and narrative sterility.

The film’s unvarying lack of drama or direction can be wearing, but the schlubby originality of its subject fully repays the longueurs.

This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.

At its best when merging shocks with social commentary, this halting compilation improves significantly as it nears the end of the alphabet.

Collated for momentum, the film’s many interviews, wide-ranging archival footage and montage of modern ecological disasters form a blunt but carefully positioned instrument. And despite a bit of Michael Moore-style nonsense at the end the tightly edited narrative displays a reach (nine countries) and clarity of composition that hold the attention.

Simon Dennis’s photography is glossy and crisp, and a lengthy foot chase — making excellent use of the National Gallery — is inventively choreographed. And if the villains are little more than fireplugs in balaclavas, the violence they provoke is satisfyingly vicious.

Though the directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, smartly choose examples from among the working poor — reframing obesity as chronic malnourishment in areas where it’s easier to find a burger than a banana — they’re reluctant to get down in the political dirt.

The dialogue is dreadful (though we are at least spared the usual hokey Russian accents) and the wrap-up ridiculous, the only mystery being why this peculiarity was ever greenlighted at all.

An unabashed sales pitch for international adoption, Thaddaeus Scheel’s Stuck aims for the heart much more than the mind.

Plagued by clunky action sequences and a porous plot the cast visibly wilts.

Delicate and autobiographical (Wang Han was the director’s name when he was a child, and the story is constructed from his boyhood memories), 11 Flowers clings steadfastly to its youthful point of view.

If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.

By the midway point, viewers will be questioning whether they would rather remain in their seats or put their eyes out with a fork.

Vividly depicting the indignities of the flesh, Porfirio offers a harshly sensual portrait of a man imprisoned by paralysis and the callousness of the state.

Gliding from intimate to surreal, from aurally disjunctive to visually seductive, Rubberband is a languorous ballad of sadness and disappointment.

A toothless examination of marketing and morality, Álex de la Iglesia’s As Luck Would Have It combines lecture, farce and soapy sentiment in a single misshapen package.

Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.

Naturalistic and mysterious, Nana is terrifyingly dependent on its diminutive star. Insisting on neither written lines nor predetermined actions (the film's short script was used primarily to obtain financing), Ms. Massadian, who worked with the child for almost two years, has coaxed a performance of remarkable lucidity.

Playing like a mashup of tropes from far superior small- and large-screen entertainments (Scandal, House of Lies, Ides of March), this clunky feature from Bill Guttentag is satire at its most soft-bellied and toadying.

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.

Discrimination against nomadic populations is hardly restricted to Romania, but the integration of that country's largest ethnic minority seems particularly pressing. If only that view were shared by the Romanian adults on screen, most of whom display a shocking degree of prejudice.

A granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing.

More than anything, FrackNation underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers.

An awkward blend of anti-Semitic atrocities and identity-swapping absurdity, the World War II drama My Best Enemy struggles to find a convincing tone.

Reuben is a whiny and uncoordinated prodigal son. His constant chafing at himself and the world is the film's biggest problem; by the midway point we're all wishing him back in Finland where he belongs.

The result is a narrow, albeit intriguing window into a technological revolt that deserves a more far-reaching film than this one.

Fueled by neither anger nor religious extremism - the director, Thierry Binisti, remains rigidly nonpartisan - "Bottle" is a gentle pairing of youthful idealism and tenacious hope.

My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.

This well-acted debut feature from Michael Connors (a former Army captain) is too limited in ambition and scope to satisfy our expectations.

Though the film eventually caves to sentiment and stereotype, its alert performances and muted rhythms offer much to enjoy in the interim.

Starring flying debris and surging walls of water, The Impossible takes the template of the old-timey disaster movie, strips it to the bone and pumps what's left up to 11.

Infinitely less than the sum of its parts, Antonino D'Ambrosio's Let Fury Have the Hour crams 50 thoughtful artists into a disappointingly muddled film.

If we must talk trash, Mr. Irons - assisted by a scientist or two and Vangelis's doomy score - is an inspired choice of guide. Soothing and sensitive, his liquid gaze alighting on oozing landfills and belching incinerators, he moves through the film with a tragic dignity that belies his whimsical neckwear and jaunty hats.

Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues.

Poking the bear of repression has consequences beyond Mr. Zahedi's immediate artistic goals, as this layered, intermittently fascinating documentary makes abundantly clear.

Poised unwaveringly between gentle comedy and delicate drama, Maya Kenig's Off White Lies keeps a lot to itself. But this narrative withholding, while infuriating at times, presents no real barrier to our engagement with the film's unconventional look at the growing connection between a shy teenage girl and her shiftless father.

Though powerfully acted and dazzlingly shot (by Walter Carvalho) in heavenly black and white, Heleno is a feverish opera that, like its doomed antihero, loses vitality much too soon.

The film presents an often sharp commentary on dueling beliefs and idiocies that unfolds in lush pastel hues and distinctively retro drawings.

He might as well be describing the act of watching this grating round robin of connubial dysfunction and romantic disappointment.

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

Bathed in the flamingo colors and Caribbean rhythms of its location, this deeply personal debut from the writer and director Mariette Monpierre develops with a lingering attention to sensation and sound.

A wry, mournful study of midlife crisis.

Delivers a brave, head-spinning commentary on the potency of advertising and the seduction of the soul.

A well-meaning but inexpertly dramatized account of the roundup of 13,000 Parisian Jews in the summer of 1942.

Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, Hitler's Children takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.

A story that, though sickly fascinating, is as crudely rendered as its images.

This spare first feature from the Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy (drawing on his own experiences) has an atavistic pulse, evoking a decaying society where elevators fail and bus drivers cower behind mesh grills.

Low-key and low-tech, Lunch coasts on the earned wisdom of pros who know how to work a room. Right up to the arrival of their separate checks.

Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer), digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences - some desperate, some hopeful, all tragic - into a first-person commentary on the malign reverberations of war.

Pim's withdrawn demeanor and inability to verbalize his emotions - the character is basically one big ache - make it more challenging than it should be to immerse ourselves in his journey.

Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.

This astonishingly effective environmental nightmare is based on reasoning that, if you've been following the science, seems all too possible.

With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.

Neither educational nor engaging.

Newlyweds are slaughtered, a child kidnapped and a suicide bombing foiled, all of it advanced by chunks of clumsy dialogue and embarrassingly labored acting.

Unfolding in awkward diner conversations and uncomfortable bedroom scenes, Gut has a cold, flat look that gives even a child's stuffed toy a sinister sheen.

Sleep Tight is a nifty little thriller that dances on the boundary between plausible and preposterous.

Though at times a tad worshipful, the film's tone is ultimately more awed than hagiographic, its commenters too cleareyed and candid to back away from negative publicity or public disenchantment.

This scattershot investigation of the effects of Internet pornography on female behavior only ruffles the surface of a complex issue, one that demands a much larger sample than three white, educated women.

A film that begins as a family quest but evolves into a gripping study of know-don't-tell reticence and the umbilical tie of a lost homeland.

Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, Smiley, like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.

Though both actors deliver performances more credible than the plot that frames them, their authenticity only highlights the script's affection for improbable coincidences and an ending even Garry Marshall might consider too pat.

A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.

In My Mother's Arms takes a distressing snapshot of an ongoing struggle.

Part infomercial, part public-service announcement, Trade of Innocents carries such a suffocating human-rights burden that it never had much chance of becoming an actual movie. Yes, child trafficking is horrific; but embedding your raise-the-alarm mission in a film this inept runs the risk of arousing more amusement than activism.

A low-budget horror anthology with segments both ghastly and moronic.

Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.

Advocating freedom from a system that "doesn't want you to die and doesn't want you to get well," this hard-hitting film leaves us finally more hopeful than despairing.

Unable to shape these events into a dramatic structure, the director, Camilo Vila, resorts to a meandering tale of random indignities suffered by a lead so bland he comes across less as principled than as stupendously naïve.

If wallowing in the creative hiccups of tortured scribblers is your moviegoing goal, there are much better options.

Looper, a cocky sci-fi tale with more brass than substance, is rife with these "Say what?" moments.

Augmented by a trove of archival footage reaching back to the 1930s, Jesse Feldman's buoyant cinematography merges political history and sports mania into a triumphant timeline.

Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.

The film's kinky energy eventually wanes, the pileup of profanities losing its initial zing.

Pairing a dull romance with an even duller sport (at least as represented here), this cliché-ridden vanity project is more suited to the ABC Family channel than to the inside of a movie theater.

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

Woven together, these monologues of bereavement and confusion, illustrated with images so terrible they repel rational explanation, form a tapestry of human misery that's impossible to shake off.

Taking place almost entirely inside computer-simulated global locations, "Retribution" moves closer than ever to its airless video game roots.

Unfolding in somber tones and among hard surfaces, Arbitrage has the slickness of new bank notes and the confidence of expensive tailoring.

Despite on-point performances (especially from the hilarious Mr. Wodianka), the story (by Tomasz Thomson, who also directs) is too pitted with holes and loose ends to permit the film a bump from meh to marvelous.

In this visual caress of postindustrial blight, disintegration has never looked so gorgeous.

The very definition of modest, Las Acacias articulates emotional transformation with simplicity and grace. Rarely has a film managed to say so much while saying so little.

With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.

That stink, like iffy contracts and child labor laws, remains unexplored. Filled with blind eyes and unspoken agreements, Girl Model opens a can of worms, then disdains to follow their slimy trails.

Ultimately his story draws more energy from class than from criminality: awash in sludgy browns and rotting greens - the colors of poverty and decomposition - this unpredictable oddity is a little bonkers but a lot original.

Even if you resist the film's claims of being based on one family's actual experiences, The Possession is eerily enjoyable pulp. Perched somewhere between "The Exorcist" and "The Amityville Horror" - and with a dash of "The Unborn" - the story benefits from an unusually restrained sound design and special effects that enhance but never obliterate its troubled-family center.

Told with multiple flashbacks and minimal taste, this exuberantly scuzzy thriller - shot in less than two weeks with a budget as micro as the women's skirts - pits sleazy cops against fun-loving disrobers in the middle of scraggly foliage.

Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.

A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.

Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.

That said, this deliciously nutty love story - sample dialogue: "Let me eat this heart, then we can pick azaleas together" - is blindingly gorgeous to look at and exceptionally well acted, at least by the women.

A slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it's fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can't quite believe what they're seeing.

Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.

I went to school in Aberdeen and know the region well. It's a place of unforgiving winds and magnificent sunsets, harsh farmland and deserted beaches. The people are hardy, hardworking and fiercely self-sufficient, asking little of their government except the will to do the right thing. They weren't Trumped; they were betrayed.

For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.

Documenting the vigorous strategies employed by the Dole Food Company to block the release of his 2009 film "Bananas!" - about a lawsuit brought by Nicaraguan workers who suspected the company's use of dangerous pesticides - the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten gains traction by taking the high road.

It's tough to care about characters who spend most of their lives obsessing over the violent deaths of others.

The film's sweetness is endearing but too featherweight to engage.

Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.

One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.

Illustrating the film's rags-to-ring narrative with panoramic mountain views and compact shots of young bodies punching their way up the food chain, Mr. Sun straddles ancient and modern, tranquillity and turmoil, with equal sureness.

And by exploring the lighter side of communal action - the camaraderie and cruising that turned weekly meetings into what one member calls "a combination of serious politics and joyful living" - he uncouples the gravity of the cause from the perceived humorlessness of advocacy. Foot soldiers for the dying, the members of Act Up never forgot how to live.

Crammed with color and imagination, every one of Jake Pollock's gorgeously photographed images feels timelessly suspended between innocence and awareness.

Relaxed performances and pillow-soft photography compensate somewhat for the story's narrow ambitions, but they're not enough to invigorate a movie that clearly would rather charm than challenge.

Blessed with natural performances and brisk pacing, this unusual little movie would like us to know just one thing: Passion is fine, but a pal is priceless.

This one is for Hank Williams fanatics only, and Mr. Thomas puts a dark and subtle sheen on a disappointingly watery script. Cover versions of Williams's songs - several sung by his daughter, Jett - remind us why he mattered, even as the movie fails to do the same.

Veering from ridiculous to revolting, The Tortured would like to be about more than singed nipples and seared skin. And it is: It's also about cracked toes and lanced eardrums.

Narrating as he goes, his humor as warm and dry as the ground beneath his feet, Mr. Soling is an unconventional explorer whose interactions with the long-suffering Ik - the women quiet and watchful, the men seamed and talkative - are politely deferential. He's clearly not there to engage in scientific study; he's simply reaching out across continents on a hunch that even eminent scientists can get it wrong.

Alien invasion is just an excuse for romantic farce in Extraterrestrial, a tiresome roundelay of lies, lust and leaping paranoia.

A beautifully filmed and patiently explained assessment of a proposal to build five hydroelectric dams in the Patagonia region of Chile.

Creepy, silly, startling, irritating, and black-vomit-and-multicolored-urine disgusting, The Oregonian wears out its welcome within 30 minutes.

An ostensible romantic comedy that's really just a grating portrait of an irredeemable jerk.

This scrappy-slick confessional is a fascinating study in dualities.

Though leaving us with many more questions than answers, this well-intentioned blur of accusations, advertising clips and pink-washed events nevertheless deserves to be seen.

The film is a riveting portrait of young men in shock and in mourning as the tragedy stirs feelings that have long lain dormant.

Hysteria, a disappointingly limp ode to the invention of the vibrator, plays like a Merchant Ivory Production of "Portnoy's Complaint."

Unless you're among those who still drop acid as a midnight-movie apéritif, your enjoyment of this retro oddity remains far from guaranteed.

Generating suspense without blowing the special-effects budget, Mr. Sanchez paints an intimate portrait of a tormented personality. Though horrors are eventually unveiled, the film is more chilling in its slower, quieter moments.

His (Jackson) doleful revenant is in almost every scene, and this hardworking actor seems to know that the film around him should be a light-footed caper instead of a grim noir with a side order of deviance.

Moments of insight flare like fireflies and disappear, whether from underfinancing or overambition is unclear. Either way, this maddening mind game is likely to be more enthusiastically received in philosophy classrooms than in the multiplex.

The best thing about Small, Beautifully Moving Parts is its admission that a positive pregnancy test is not always cause for giddy celebration; the worst thing is that, even at a lean 73 minutes, this flimsy road movie feels at least 43 minutes too long.

Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.

The dead are unquiet and the living are terrified in The Road, a powerfully atmospheric blend of ghostly encounters, horrific situations and missing-persons mysteries from the Philippine director Yam Laranas.

Alternately tedious and illuminating, this deeply honest and scattered movie revels in its lack of purpose.

Crisply shot and surprisingly well acted, Mother's Day suffers from an overly long script (a tornado hovers off screen to no apparent purpose) and annoying glitches in continuity.

Unfolding in New England over four vibrantly represented seasons, "Feelings" is a small-scale wonder. Pivotal events play out in the spaces between scenes, leaving only emotional imprints that we interpret within a timeline that may not be entirely linear.

The wonder of Black's performance here is its empathy and balance: inasmuch as he can disappear into any role, he dissolves into this one with no hint of mocking remove. It's a beautiful thing to see.

Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.

A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.

More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.

To experience Chimpanzee, the latest piece of gorgeously shot pablum from Disneynature, is to endure an orgy of cuteness pasted over some of the most asinine narration ever to ruin a wildlife movie.

Little more than a showcase for Mr. Quint - whose acting is almost as toneless as his playing is sublime - this trite, sunny drama pins lengthy musical interludes onto the flimsiest of narratives and hopes for the best.

Roiling with jealousy, suicide and latent lesbian urges, The Moth Diaries dances on the border between hallucination and reality without fully committing to either. Yet the film's narrative frailties are offset by impeccable performances and a consistently eerie tone, helped along by a location as forbidding as the "Overlook."

The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.

Without Mr. Roberts and his grinning insouciance, this well-meaning mess would have no heartbeat at all.

Bolstered by animated re-enactments and Bob Richman's frosty cinematography, Unraveled is a mesmerizing one-man dive into narcissism, entitlement and unchecked greed.

Even were it not so delightful, Damsels in Distress, set at a fictional upper-crust college, would deserve a watch for its dialogue alone.

A sad chronicle of absent fathers and messed-up mothers, drugs as currency and violence as the period at the end of every argument.

In place of emotional stakes, we get gleaming, stylized, occasionally slow-motion violence, filmed in such extreme close-ups and cramped spaces that it's impossible to differentiate gunman and victim.

It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.

If the 20-odd seconds of blank screen squatting pointlessly amid the opening credits aren't enough warning that you're in for some seriously sluggish storytelling, then the adoption of a snail as one of the central motifs should drive the point home.

The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.

With its soft, bleached images and occasional detours into black-and-white stills, Turn Me On, set in an unspecified recent past, has a gentle oddness as unforced as its performances and as inoffensive as its dialogue.

Propriety and recklessness make for uneasy bedfellows in The Deep Blue Sea, a shimmering exploration of romantic obsession and the tension between fitting in and flying free.

Not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women's health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.

This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.

Ms. Howe is frequently riveting: a scene in which she repeatedly, and with waxing abuse, drunk-calls her former husband (an excellent Keith Allen) may make more than a few viewers squirm in recognition.

The Kid With a Bike feels as vulnerable as Cyril's unformed character. Within its tight 87 minutes, not a lot happens, unless you count the saving of a life.

If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.

Mr. Donaldson has proven deftness with panting plots and knife-edge tension, but this cobbled-together noir does him no justice at all.

A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.

The result is a talky, predictable, less-audacious-than-it-thinks romantic comedy.

Filmed in high-definition black and white, Ms. Menkes's often exquisite compositions - a single, attenuated shot of the aftermath of a car crash is a miracle of choreography - drive a narrative mired in poverty and spiritual desperation.

Highlighting the wacky while playing down the distasteful, Marie Losier's playful profile of the English musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his second wife, Lady Jaye, takes a lighthearted look at the things they did for love.

The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."

Nevertheless the fierce loyalty of Mr. Liebling's nearest and dearest is extremely touching, and Last Days Here - despite its stinginess with back story and early performance footage - works hard to reveal the man beneath the four-decade heroin habit.

At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.

The Snowtown Murders reminds us that sometimes evil is immediately recognizable, but at other times it comes bearing bacon and beer.

Seriously depleting the skanky-villain bin at central casting, the moronic thriller Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill.

Richly photographed by Rob Hardy (who gave Red Riding: 1974 its almost surreal bleakness), this meticulously researched story (Marston spent a month interviewing families trapped in these vendettas) reveals a culture dominated by male pride and patriarchal selfishness.

This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.

Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.

Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.

What emerges is a poignant commentary on the uneasy commingling of love and fame.

Warmhearted and defiantly unsentimental, Grandma, a Thousand Times gains lightness from Teta's tart observations.

Much better to focus on the tempestuous Mercutio (Hale Appleman, a standout), whose increasing volatility forms the perfect counterpoint to Mr. Doyle's beaming Juliet and Seth Numrich's sensitive Romeo. Punctuated by eerily static shots of empty basketball courts and deserted hallways, Mercutio's blustering menace is as timeless as the romance he seeks to derail.

The result is a movie that feels more like a free-market sales pitch than like a critical look at one weapon in the poverty-fighting arsenal that may or may not offer long-term hope.

West's throwback style and disdain for excess allows his characters to shine.

Mr. Defa and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, are united in their disdain for information over mood: as the camera skitters spastically around its troubled schlub, the film becomes a muddy, minimalist moan of desperation.

That assured style is the spackle that holds Kill List together: when the plot doglegs into insanity, and the characters follow suit, this brutal fever dream refuses to fall apart.

While occasionally unpleasant, the film never crosses the line from bearably chilling to unbearably gruesome, keeping its characters credible and its events explicable.

Though speckled here and there with uneasy comedy, Toll Booth is a psychological pressure cooker that could blow its lid at any moment.

Niall MacCormick's direction, while unfocused, locates a sweet center in the bonding of the two young girls, effortlessly capturing the way unexpected friendship, like first love, can completely alter the look of the world.

Photographed in crisp black and white by Nat Bouman, this enormously likable movie keeps sexual politics on the back burner and the universal search for connection front and center.

Whichever side of the aisle you inhabit, you will leave The Iron Lady feeling disgusted; you will also feel cheated - of information, insight or even an identifiable point of view.

Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.

What we need is for the writer and director, David Pomes, to wallow less in aimless dialogue and lowlife sordidness. What we need is a point.

Straight-shooting, hard-hitting and fuming with contempt for the tobacco industry, Addiction Incorporated would be almost too exhausting to watch were it not for the folksy charm of its star witness.

An intermittently interesting but fatally clichéd comedy of personal and professional suicide.

Red Hook Black crawls forward by means of stilted conversations and vacuous exchanges.

Somehow the happy screams of children whirling above a neutered reactor sound a lot less comforting than they should.

Lads & Jockeys conveys first-race terrors and last-place humiliation with indulgent thoroughness.

As we join throngs of excited citizens at a public vote-counting, their uninhibited zeal for the process only highlights the jaded cynicism that threatens to overwhelm our own.

Filled with joyless people in drab rooms (Josh Silfen's grubby cinematography doesn't make things any cheerier), Silver Tongues takes a novel idea and uses it to jerk us around. Swirling with unease, its scenes set us up for a payoff that never materializes and strand its actors in a bitter present.

This emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization would much rather wallow in the distress of specific families than engage with the needs of the population at large.

Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.

An ingenious black comedy written and directed by James Westby, comes at you like a horror movie before settling down into something quieter but equally skin crawling.

As she learns the value of public schools and pickup trucks, her erstwhile friends in Philadelphia seem happy to be rid of her. By movie's end, you'll feel exactly the same.

Dog Sweat (the title is slang for alcohol) is surprisingly polished, the young actors warmly believable despite being restricted by the film's narrow focus.

The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.

Captured mostly in gorgeous black and white, The Love We Make is alternately trite, touching, funny and fascinating.

Seamlessly dovetailing style and subject, Dragonslayer, a poetic and affectionate portrait of the professional skateboarder Josh Sandoval.

What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.

What begins as an amusing fluff piece ("Daddy's messed up," mumbles one woozy subject after dropping his gurgling infant) slowly emerges as a compelling and often touching peek at punk paternity.

Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.

Smart, wordy and sweetly sympathetic to lives lived online, Sidewalls coasts on Martín and Mariana's twin voice-overs, alternate musings on themselves and their city.

For those who care about the winning and losing of championship belts, the film's slow-motion attention to pugilistic style and powerhouse punches is thrillingly instructive.

The film leans almost exclusively on the focused performances of its two leads, who create a credibly barbed chemistry that goes a long way toward distracting us from the film's low-budget deficiencies.

This debut feature from Matthijs van Heijningen is as stiff as the Antarctic tundra. Where the earlier film pulsed with precisely calibrated paranoia and distinctly drawn characters, this inarticulate replay unfolds as mechanistically as a video game.

This crackpot thriller from the usually competent Jim Sheridan leaves only one mystery unsolved: what on earth was he thinking?

Painfully stark yet utterly magnetic, You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo presents excerpts from the 2003 interrogation of the 16-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen accused of killing an American soldier during a firefight in an Afghan village.

Notable at least in part for its fumbled potential, this health-care-industry melodrama possesses all the right ingredients: an idealistic young lawyer, a corrupt corporate villain and a sympathetic victim. It just fails to assemble them into a compelling whole.

By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.

Ms. Nichols is consistently appealing in the kind of role Zooey Deschanel has pretty much cornered, and Philippe Rousselot's nighttime shots of highway tragedy are dreamily atmospheric. If only Roger Towne's screenplay had focused less on the metaphysical import of Lyman's savior impulses and more on the physical rewards of his salvaged life.

As a trippy, trifling memorial to a time before its eponymous club was a mini-mall and rave culture a woozy memory, Limelight delivers the messed-up goods.

Silent Souls is part folk tale, part lesson in letting go. In its quiet acceptance of the passing of time, this unusual film reminds us that to die is not always the same as to disappear.