Joe Leydon

Grim but engrossing.

The deliberately jittery hand-held lensing enhances the mockery in this mockumentary.

May be too grisly to extend its appeal beyond its fan base.

Based loosely and playfully on Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," From Prada to Nada is a predictable but pleasant comedy.

Neatly avoiding temptations toward mawkish excess, writer-director Chris Dowling hits a solid double with Where Hope Grows, his intelligently affecting faith-based drama.

Documentarian Jessica Yu employs everything from animation and voiceover thesping to archival documents and eyewitness accounts while examining Henry Darger, a self-taught artist who has been posthumously lionized as a visionary genius.

A by-the-playbook, family-friendly basketball comedy that never strays outside the paint, Thunderstruck likely won’t score much coin during its limited theatrical runs. Still, this lightly amusing confection — a Warner Premiere presentation that all too obviously resembles a typical made-for-homevid product — could rebound during playoffs in smallscreen platforms.

Evan Ross impresses with an implosive performance as Tariq Mahdi, a moody young African-American.

The adults do little more than provide marquee allure in brief bookending scenes that add little to rest of the pic. For the most part, Now and Then is a showcase for four fine actresses in their early teens.

Well-cast relationship comedy-drama is played too broadly in the early going, but gradually settles into a more appealing groove as a glossy date-movie.

Run This Town offers some sharp observations about the struggle to provide anything like watchdog journalism in an age of diminished budgets and readership.

Premise is formulaic and execution is predictable, but Brock maintains a lively pace while eliciting first-rate work from thesps.

Choreographer-turned-filmmaker Franc. Reyes covers familiar ground without stumbling or dazzling.

The sort of movie a lot of us need right now. It’s an undemandingly enjoyable and reassuringly predictable dramedy in which nothing, not even the sourball attitudes of its comically unpleasant malcontents, ever is allowed to get out of hand or unduly strain credibility. But it also is too playfully spiky and unaffectedly down-to-earth to come across as bland pablum.

A pleasantly predictable faith-based dramedy.

Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.

Ultimately, however, this tonally untidy yet incrementally affecting dramedy scores a cumulative impact by credibly and astutely depicting eruptions, disruptions and reconciliations during the long goodbye to a dying paterfamilias.

This thoroughly predictable but undeniably engaging faith-based drama is an inoffensively old-fashioned entertainment that, with only minor tweaking, could pass for a Walt Disney Studios release of yore.

The documentary is too tepid to generate anything like excitement or outrage, and elicits admiration more for its intentions than for its execution.

Offers a relatively fresh take on standard-issue exorcism-melodrama tropes, along with a performance by Aaron Eckhart that is more than persuasive enough to encourage the investment of a rooting interest.

Performances are unremarkable but acceptable pretty much across the board, and the vocal talents -- particularly Thomas Haden Church as the belligerent Tazer and Josh Peck as the lovable Sparks -- are well cast.

A solidly crafted piece of work that, despite its leisurely pacing, manages to infuse a respectable amount of fresh vigor into clichés and conventions common to shoot-’em-ups set during the post-Civil War era.

This filmed-in-Texas road movie finds a smooth groove between self-conscious quirkiness and broadly played farce.

Inside the Rain is so fresh and audacious in so many ways that it’s a bit of letdown when it leans heavily on the cliché of the Gold-Hearted Hooker — or, in this case, the Gold-Hearted Porn Actress and Part-Time Escort — to provide Benjamin with inspiration, emotional support, and, most important, a female lead for his film.

Even though Frakes is back, Star Trek: Insurrection plays less like a stand-alone sci-fi adventure than like an expanded episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

There's no denying the pic's overall impact as a compelling study of art as a source of transcendence. And it will come as no surprise if this well-crafted doc eventually serves as source material for a dramatic feature.

This overly long yet consistently involving period drama... could be described, accurately, as equal parts “Remember the Titans” and revivalist tent meeting. But until the balance tips rather too blatantly toward the latter during the final minutes, the overall narrative mix of history lesson, gridiron action and spiritual uplift is effectively and satisfyingly sustained.

The film sustains more than enough dramatic tension from scene to scene to keep a viewer intrigued, despite the sporadic fuzziness of motivation and plot specifics.