Jen Chaney

It’s a perfectly pleasant cinema-studies seminar, but one that stops just short of teaching its students anything truly insightful.

Momoa does capture some scenes of genuine warmth and beauty that suggest he has the potential to develop a filmmaker’s eye for visual poetry.

To Pond and Marcolina’s credit, this isn’t just a character study of an ever-adventurous klepto-gran. The documentary also raises questions about whether a professional liar can ever really stop lying.

Wolf — who wrote Teenage with Jon Savage, author of “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945” — deftly weaves together various media in a way that breathes its own youthful, stream-of-conscious life into the documentary genre.

The movie plays out like an improbably plotted work of overly aggressive schmaltz.

Animated in form but completely listless in content.

Decoding Annie Parker could have shown much more effectively and deeply that the fight against an often ruthless disease can be won by women attacking it from multiple sides. Instead, it sticks mostly to one track, taking audience members on a journey that, sadly, via the movies or their own lives, they already may know a little too well.

The faux-doc foundation simply doesn’t work here.

This film can’t decide whether it’s a Noah Baumbach-ian character study or an episode of NBC’s Revolution.

It doesn’t provide enough rigorously reported context about what happened in 1991 to feel like anything close to a definitive portrait of the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas saga.

The film captures its lush, leafy settings with an understated evocativeness that fully immerses the audience in its sense of place. The problem is that the movie ultimately leans too heavily on that sense of understatement, failing to let genuine, unexpected emotion fully break through to the surface.

As directed by Perry, The Single Moms Club goes for a mix of escapism and reality-based drama and winds up with a movie that can only be enjoyed via the running, snarky commentary that will inevitably scroll through most audience members’ heads as they watch.

Need for Speed is a piece of auto-collision pornography that weighs down its car-flip-and-massive-fireball money shots with a preposterous plot involving vehicular manslaughter vengeance.

The Bag Man is always teetering on the edge of amateurish absurdity, before being tugged back from the edge by its actors.

Thanks to remarkable access to her subject, and a refusal to turn away during even the most personal moments, Karasawa has made something deeper: a portrait of Stritch just as the aging process is beginning to punch holes in her concrete dam of a personality.

Hall and Hart have appeared together in several movies, including 2012’s Think Like A Man, but have never been paired as love interests. Here, they lock into a manic, improvisational groove from minute one.

In a movie like this, where plot points are practically an aside, the characters’ depth and the dialogue quality are what give it potentially memorable zing. Cavemen is not only zingless, it practically pulls a muscle attempting to generate some.

Nearly every one of the film’s attempts at comedy is clichéd, tasteless, or forced—sometimes all three at once.

Lacks a sense of structure and purpose, ambling from one tense conversation to the next without effectively making a impact.

Angels Sing is a heartfelt but less-than-polished piece of work that isn’t for everyone, particularly those who can’t suspend the disbelief required to accept preposterous plot developments, or the sight of Lyle Lovett wearing a variety of snowman sweatshirts. But graded on a Christmas-movie curve, it actually isn’t bad.

Plush fails to be a turn-on: It’s all surface and zero substance, with limp attempts at shock value.

As a stand-alone documentary, it begs for more conflict and a broader canvas from which to explore the contemporary theater scene.

It’s an air-kiss of a movie, one that places a non-contact peck on either side of its subject’s mouth, then breezes off before a serious conversation can begin.

What Mickle really gets right, and what makes this far and away a more artful and effective work of skin-crawly horror than its predecessor, is atmosphere.

As an enjoyable documentary about the history behind a surprising game-changer of a song, this film works well. But it misses the opportunity to take its material to the next level and say something bigger.

Its ongoing reveal of interconnected, rough-edged characters, as well as a tone that’s a twangy, noirish brew of the Coen brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, and Winter’s Bone, are ultimately what make the movie unsettling and absorbing.

This movie’s pleasures are less about its villains and more about the interplay between Pegg and Frost.

This is a film about people whose stories are still being written, and who, despite their palpable sense of exhaustion, are still seeking healing and hope. There are no Hollywood endings here. That’s just the truth, which Gurchiani has proved she’s committed to capturing.