John DeFore

Predictably full of great performing footage and incorporating new interviews with the too-few surviving witnesses, the doc may hold few revelations for baby boomers and their kids, who've had ample opportunities to revisit the material. But it will make a fine entry point for younger auds who grew up with the songs but never had Beatlemania shoved down their throats.

Lola Kirke stands in no one's shadow here, delivering a quietly winning performance that would ensure viewer identification even if her character's challenging first-love plight weren't so universal.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

This film feels more of a piece with the fashion shows and musical efforts it chronicles: an art-therapy product valuable mostly to those who made it.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

The film will have a hard time attracting attention outside the community of veterans. But that doesn't diminish its ability to put us in the shoes of ordinary men balancing boredom with life-or-death action on a daily basis.

Tracy Droz Tragos works to get beyond us-versus-them simplicity in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, focusing on personal narrative over politics in a humanistic look at an issue that promises to remain divisive for the foreseeable future.

This is a family movie about cats? Please, somebody tell the three separate teams of screenwriters credited with penning this thing.

One of the most enriching and enjoyable docs about a filmmaker in recent memory.

The shtick sticks in The Mind's Eye, which lovingly apes period details, this time with psychokinetic warriors instead of alien invaders. But where the first film was dour, this one works so hard at its ultra-grave air of menace that it eventually turns (intentionally, one hopes) comic, building to third-act violence that will leave the right kind of audience howling with delight.

In a time of plentiful lush and/or enlightening food docs, only viewers who idolize Rene Redzepi and his talented crew need pay attention to this one.

Laughs do not exactly pour forth from this dreary and frequently insulting picture.

What at first looks like a mumblecore comedy with a supernatural twist turns into something darker, and many viewers will not feel like going along for the detour into psychological horror.

A surprisingly uncritical doc from a filmmaker whose rep is built on skeptical investigation, Joe Berlinger's Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru doesn't seem to know whether its title is ironic or not.

Not as committed to its spacey perceptuo-metaphysical premise as it seems at the start, the film seems more interested in whether one woman can convince another to buy into a project she doesn't understand.

A textbook case in which personal eccentricities and addictions collide with musical brilliance, the story of New Orleans pianist James Booker is so colorful it's hard to believe nobody has made a biopic yet

Setting out to show the range of expression found in a field of craft it feels is too often dismissed as a trivial women's pastime, Una Lorenzen's Yarn showcases four artists doing things with crochet your spinster great-aunt probably never imagined.

Though it's better than its "dump this thing" theatrical release would suggest, Cell is far from excellent.

Aside from a supporting turn by Hannibal Buress as a king-of-the-geeks character, the film's most diverting ingredients are its aggressively crude character design and its sickly color palette.

As much as Don't Think Twice focuses on professional envy, though, it remains a love letter to this weirdo art form called improv.

There's not a scary moment in the movie, and its characters are neither likable enough to root for nor so repulsive we eagerly await their deaths.

Given the dearth of docs about the heyday of circus arts, one wishes for more of that spotlight showmanship on the screen.

Ti West's In a Valley of Violence plays like a grim, Eastwood-style genre revival before some conspicuous Tarantino-influenced humor infects its climactic showdown.

Jonas is, it should be said, the most likeable thing about this watered-down noir.

Ruhm's lively pace keeps the plot's essential silliness from growing tiresome, even if it never kicks into the high-octane farce the picture seems to seek.

Though never managing to surprise us much, this brisk encounter with the living past has moments of charm and the occasional fresh perspective.

The movie never really achieves the claustrophobic, under-siege atmosphere of Night of the Living Dead. And it's kind of a good thing we're not trapped with this family, since, despite some fine acting by Mille Dinesen (as Gustav's mom) and others, Mikkelsen's script offers too little character development to keep us interested in them.

A first-rate music film capturing a restless desire to communicate beyond the boundaries of any single idiom.

An intriguing but iffy look at alternative therapies that ignores some questions about its subjects.

Some viewers will find the film's mannered performances and direction silly; but while Wang Tianlin's lensing doesn't match the luxuriant sheen that Christopher Doyle and Philippe Le Sourd have delivered for Wong, the production elements do add up to a coherent style.

Focused much more intently on video journals Gleason made as his illness progressed, the film both documents his rapid physical decline and ponders the many existential issues it raises — especially for a married couple expecting their first child in a few months.

Dreamy, poetry-filled and prone to veering off on tangents, the picture teases viewers with such self-assurance it's difficult to believe the twentysomething director is a first-timer.

Throughout, connoisseurs of Cage's career should appreciate a performance that rides the edge of his crazy tendencies.

Amid the rarely very creepy buildup to the Amityville-ish showdown to come, the screenplay piles on more unrelated domestic drama than the picture can take.

The ironies of gentrification will be a chief attraction for this lovely new 4K restoration of the 16mm original. But that theme is just a bonus in a picture whose in-the-trenches look at poverty is humane and, sadly, perpetually timely.

What it all adds up to is either laughably baffling or just plain laughable, depending on how much attention one has paid.

Malik Bader's Cash Only is one of the more convincingly gritty indies to hit fests in several seasons.

The artwork is achingly delicate, but there's nothing subtle about Belladonna of Sadness, a blast of psychedelic madness full of rape, tyranny and Satanism.

In their awkward attempt to shoehorn these kids into the first pic's formula, Stoller and his writing collaborators care far less about creating believable characters than getting to the next laugh.

German Kral's Our Last Tango balances between a studious fascination with the dance form's history and an embrace of the passions it stokes. Far more engrossing than the usual doc of this sort.

The determined, gently cantankerous oldster's personality is the main attraction here, in a doc that takes viewers' interest for granted.

Though less novel than Flanagan's previous pic, Oculus, Hush finds plenty of ways to flip roles in this cat-and-mouse game, letting his heroine get a bead on her stalker only to see the advantage taken away from her again.

The only people sure to love this concoction are those working for Rio's tourism bureau.

The rest of us will likely fall into one of two camps regarding this well-intentioned film: those who praise it for drawing attention to the suffering of helpless children, and those who find it sufficiently lacking in cinematic value to decide there are better ways of helping those kids than spending 90 minutes watching it.

It's a welcome human-scale outing for a director who stumbled upon leaping from 2000's breakout debut Girlfight to the would-be tentpole dud Aeon Flux.

The film is a body-mover above all, with great vintage clips pairing nicely with well-photographed new material in which dancers wearing appropriate fashion dance in slo-mo — everyone reveling in the melting-pot beat.

Even given the standards of off-the-rails cinematic family reunions, you'd have to look a while to find one as bizarre as Anders Thomas Jensen's Men & Chicken.

Making good use of his camera-department experience on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations and elsewhere, Shirai seeks out the visual appeal of both the brewery's operation.

A resourceful dreamer needn't be alienated from fields of endeavor usually requiring years of training or unthinkable wealth. Imagination, seriousness and a small set of shop tools are sufficient.

Foodstuffs, metaphysics and a heap of raunchy action add up to something surprisingly hilarious.

Minimalist in terms of action and scope but attentive to the texture of what is onscreen.

Walken is the main attraction here; though the film identifies more with the wayward daughter, played by Amber Heard, it doesn't make her nearly as interesting as his name-dropping, spotlight-hogging entertainer.

This may not be adequate compensation for the end of their series, which gave them so many more opportunities to try on new personalities and take one-gag ideas for a spin. But it will delight the show's fans while winning over others unlucky enough never to have seen it.

It's as honest and clear-eyed about the past as its predecessor, another in a filmography of unpredictable gems. It may be most like Dazed in that the public could take a while to appreciate it for what it is.

Pegging most of its hopes on two actors who hardly maintain the taut chemistry its long two-hander section requires, the pic plays like the feature debut it is, an uncertain drama full of attitude it can't back up with action.

A tough sell theatrically despite its merits, the film will rely on Jones' name to reach viewers via home-video outlets.

The second half groans under too many dumb contrivances, even if the dumbest — a sword fight at a publicity event — leads to a credit-sequence gag that earns more laughs than anything in the film.

More stylishly compelling and seamlessly produced than it is imaginative.

Some of the surprises in store play better than others.

Galland's film plays more like a cable-ready mystery than a cult film in the making, offering just enough chuckles to stay afloat.

Though the material is juicy and the interviews heartfelt, the doc doesn't completely succeed in efforts to explain the spell this and similar groups cast on their acolytes.

There's nothing moribund about the action in King Georges, the lively first film directed by doc producer Erika Frankel, which observes the perfectionist workhorse in his kitchen.

The film embraces ambiguity in the end, with a coda that places Marco and Carla on the same level but not in the same place. The scene's unsettled but peaceful mood seems an honest reflection of its characters' lives.

It may never be quite solid enough for us to be truly worried about its inhabitants' happiness, but watching them pursue that happiness is a uniquely diverting experience.

A few bright moments aside, these annoying characters don't grow on us anywhere near as much as the filmmakers expect them to, and the shoestring-budget FX work, which would be more than good enough in a film buoyed by some wit, just underlines the movie's pedestrian qualities.

Even fans who've stuck with Smith for two decades may draw the line at this outing, which offers ingredients just as inexplicable as those in Tusk (it's a sort of spinoff of that film) without the captivating weirdness that sometimes brought that midnighter to life.

It's an invigorating chance to experience from afar an ordeal that, unless your name is Eliot Spitzer, you and I will never have to endure.

Kelly depicts a deep filial love that isn't dependent on complete telepathic understanding.

The film pulls off the action climax of this spy-vs-spy narrative quite well given its obviously limited means. But Avalanche will attract more attention for its sneaky ethic...and for its efforts at recreating a period-appropriate look.

A safer but still funny follow-up to Jeff Baena's provocative debut.

The movie's structure is peculiar, laying out a mystery and solving it early on, then spending half the film making us wonder how satisfying that solution was.

The essence of what made the man inspiring to so many — it's not the winning, but the effort that's important — comes through with gonglike clarity in Dexter Fletcher's film, a straight-down-the-ramp sports tale that plays to the average man's dreams of momentary greatness.

Gentry's tense screenplay works well on its own, but gets a big assist from music and production design intent on conjuring some very specific moods.

First-timers Sean Mewshaw and Desi Van Til show no evidence of inexperience in this sturdy and crowd-pleasing picture.

The filmmakers' access is remarkable, and they eventually compound the film's novelty in an exciting way (spoilers below). But claims that this film opens our eyes to unknown practices are exaggerated.

While He Never Died is hardly a comedy — it's bloody and reflective, with a gloomy side that sometimes threatens to sink it — these wry moments are central to its appeal.

Its feature-length assemblage of found footage, unified by an original soundtrack and eccentric narration by Tilda Swinton, will be too much of a good thing for some art-house patrons. But auds accustomed to the work of Bill Morrison and other archive-combing meditation artists should respond warmly.

What starts out as a familiar kind of portrait...eventually grows a layer or two more complex.

Gathering vintage interviews from a couple of different documentaries, the film movingly observes a man who can be physically unsettled by things he saw several decades prior.

If Berardini isn't very generous to the company's execs, shortchanging what is likely a genuine belief that they're doing good while making a ton of money, he does spend time with officers who, for a time, embraced the Taser eagerly.

This earnest but painfully clunky film, though professional in tech respects and seemingly well financed, plays like the work of an ambitious high school history student.

Though Whelan's debut filmmaking effort wears some of its homemade characteristics proudly, it wrangles more than enough credible interviewees to make its points.

Renzi's uneven script makes this a less sturdy vehicle than 2012's Arbitrage, and a less marketable one given the absence of thriller elements that sustained that film's character study. Still, there's plenty here for Gere's admirers to appreciate.

Buzzing attentively but not exclusively around cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, director Leah Wolchok strikes a pleasing balance between office minutiae and comic greatest hits; she gets enough face time with individual artists to please comedy nerds while keeping things wholly accessible to casual fans.

Nielsson somewhat frustratingly avoids giving us many cues to the passage of time, but nevertheless the film captures some of the drama generated by the public's impatience and Mugabe's maneuvering during the long drafting process

It offers more than enough laughs to justify taking time out from TV marathons of A Christmas Story, and maybe enough, at least for younger audiences, to become a pinch-hitter each year when established classics like Elf grow too familiar.

However polished the doc's tech and score, it simply doesn't find drama in this familiar template.

Pizzo finds nearly no drama in Freddie's path from high school to college ball.

A likeable if not especially vibrant doc.

In a brisk hour and a half Vreeland gives a good sense of her impact, while telling stories of so many love affairs and ego clashes Art Addict never feels a bit like a history lesson.

What begins as a friendly trip grows increasingly tense as the men visit sites of mass murder.

An informative if less than thrilling account of a historic career.

A disregard for the rules established by George Romero (or the alternatives imagined by Danny Boyle) is far from the only problem with Christopher Landon's film, which does prove one thing fairly handily: Even beings deprived of the intellect and spirit granted to living humans can team up to produce a major studio motion picture.

Though convincing in its (not exactly obscure) point that something needs to be done, and occasionally enlightening, Price suffers in comparison to the earlier film, with points that are often not adequately explored and decorative flourishes that distract instead of enhancing.

Through interviews and photos, Crump susses out the appeal of moving boulders and dirt with massive construction machinery.

Deathgasm is a giddy avalanche of gore and heavy metal-drenched mayhem that takes itself not even a tiny bit seriously.

Writer/director Nick Sandow finds a tailor-made lead in Vincent Piazza, who both looks the part and makes sense of his character's ridiculous aspirations; with Patricia Arquette playing the girlfriend who stood by his side, the picture of debased ambition is almost too convincing to enjoy.

As structurally simple as a high school book report, the doc is frequently dry but comes packed with performance footage, scores of interviews, and enough biographical detail to let us form our own ideas about the trickier scenes it elides in its attempt to fit an entire complicated life into under two hours.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

Solid and informative... the affectionate film benefits from plenty of face time with its frank, amiably plain-vanilla subject.

A film that flirts and flirts with explanations for its action without ever delivering.

Though the film stretches out long enough to impress us with the difficulty of their journey, the four actors ensure that the two hours or so we spend in their company aren't dull.

Far less sensationalistic or cutesy-provocative than its title suggests, the film borrows its subject's infamy to add gravity to some family drama but does so in a good-hearted way.

It is tightly in sync with protagonists who find it impossible to move on despite distractions that might be catalytic in other films.

The film conveys the sense of hanging out with a band despite the fact that we almost never see them talking to us; a mood of creative ferment overrides any detailed narrative, and although its time period includes a massive tour for the group's latest album, this is definitely not a concert film.

A crowd-pleaser despite its missteps and occasionally because of them, the pic enlivens some stale conceits about killers-for-hire and the women who love them.

Beautiful and sensitive to character but gripping when it needs to be.

The picture is one part vintage Woody Allen, a few parts Screwball-era comedy of remarriage, and a vigorous shake of Gerwig herself, without whose particular spirit — "so pure," as an admirer puts it here, and "a little stupid" — this scenario might have trouble getting off the ground.

Rather than engage in slow-build horror, Pascal Trottier's screenplay flips the switch into Poultergeisty chaos.

This picture satisfies fully on entertainment terms without cheapening its real-world concerns.

Straight history is not the whole point here, as Nelson enthusiastically conjures a sense of what it felt like to be a Panther and to be a young black person inspired by them.

Offers just enough B-movie pleasure to keep genre fans busy for a weekend or two before heading from theaters to vid.

Easygoing and always likeable but hardly packed with laughs.

Small-screen comic talent is all over Fresno, with key players from series including Parks & Rec, Arrested Development and Portlandia teaming up for a tale of two sisters stuck with a hard-to-dispose-of dead body. The feature, sadly, exhibits none of the smarts or agility that fuel those series.

Knowing and funny without straining to be clever, the found-footage-style pic works better than the Duplass Brothers' 2008 Baghead, with which it has some elements in common.

A winning film about reconciling one's self-image with reality.

Despite the obvious sadness at its heart, the doc benefits from an unforced optimism.

A pitch-perfect pastiche that never mocks its inspirations, the picture is silly fun to warm the hearts of aging fanboys and delight hipsters who weren't yet born the first time Mel Gibson donned Max's leathers.

From laughs to smarts to a credible interest in rehabilitation, lovers of love would do better to go see "Trainwreck" again.

First-timer Naar both fails to convince us of his subject's musical genius and gives the impression he's leaving out important details.

A highly enjoyable look at a career spent duping the art world.

A convincing and refreshingly indirect examination of handed-down emotional flaws.

An enjoyable entry into the swelling ranks of corrupt-the-youth comedies.

The mental issues plaguing Hazel (Bella Thorne) aren't the only disabilities on offer in a film that sometimes heaps a little too much onto the fire, but Grau and his cast are sincere in their attempt to capture her struggle with empathy and dignity.

Leacock proves to be charming company, sprinkling sometimes hilarious personal anecdotes among the high points of his career.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

A melodrama benefitting from excellent performances but suffering from a too-obvious script.

Co-directors Brent Hodge and Derik Murray go exclusively to interviewees who lived or worked with the oversized, overenergized man, all of whom clearly loved him, and if the tone of their remarks (affectionate, amazed at his charisma) is totally predictable, the specifics have enough color to hold the interest of a casual fan.

Tixier paces the narrative well, but some viewers will resent his heavy reliance on anthropomorphizing the animals and the little sequences invented to add drama to the narrative.

If the movie pushes most of the ugliest behavior off onto side players (like the notorious Suge Knight, played by R. Marcus Taylor), it does for the most part fulfill its mission, breathing life into the origin story of a group whose influence is still being felt.

Chipper and fun if occasionally superficial, the doc finds its subject too large to address in a way that satisfies the most curious outsider or devoted fan. Everyone else will have a good time, though.

Following up on his lauded debut, Welcome to Pine Hill, Miller again blends fiction and reality to fine effect.

A good-looking debut offering more atmosphere than action.

Martin's script holds some hard-boiled appeal, but his direction (some nice technical flourishes aside) doesn't back it up.

Energetic, laugh-stuffed and very colorful (it would be a feat to make a dull film about these people).

Diez's effects teams have tremendous fun with the gory ways they tear through their hosts' bodies when it's time to leave the chrysalis behind.

A time capsule capturing the flavor of early-'70s bohemian life in Oklahoma and Texas.

Art fans might reasonably expect one of the world's most successful painters to display a distinctive or at least appealing visual sense here, but they will be disappointed by Yasutaka Nagano's pedestrian photography; the film fares even worse in terms of storytelling and pacing.

[A] tender but unsentimental take on a story that benefits from finesse.

The film presupposes a bit more interest in the pair's friendship and personal lives than many viewers will have.

Despite a low-rent aesthetic that (like Grant's all-caps-happy website) doesn't sufficiently distance it from the tinfoil-hat world, Soaked presents evidence one has a hard time dismissing.

Mullins knows just how much plot this enterprise requires (answer: not a lot), avoiding boredom by giving the quartet reasons to leave houses behind and, eventually, to fracture.

The dark fantasy manages to be grindingly dull despite its many quirks.

It's a thrill, and one that seriously rewards big-screen viewing.

Star-stuffed, well paced and very funny.

Both an engaging character study and a useful introduction to issues surrounding biodiversity.

Sometimes, deadpan observation of the mundane isn't Jarmuschian. Sometimes it's just dull.

Unfortunately, [Robert Duvall's] attempt to create a multigenerational Lone Star-like mystery doesn't gel as John Sayles's film did, leaving so many dramatic moments unresolved that one wonders how many scenes must have been left on the cutting-room floor.

Neither as frightening as a good horror flick nor as enlightening as a straight documentary, Rodney Ascher's The Nightmare borrows from both worlds in its depiction of the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis.

This polished, comprehensive-feeling film makes clear how much of the work was done by our neighbors to the north.

Digging around in the crannies of his highly unusual home but never becoming intrusive, the doc feels like it was made by a friend, in a good way.

The film is focused enough on relationships not to sound preachy.

Grimy and sad but not sensationalistic, the debut feature is like Drugstore Cowboy drained of its hipness and sex appeal.

First-time feature helmer Romanowsky has a hard time distinguishing between the things that draw her to Elliott's story and the things that make him pathetic.

While Hobson's smarts are evident here, the picture's uniformly dim visuals and sometimes overplayed sound design are static enough to do a disservice to his work with the cast.

Moviegoers may expect something sexier than what they get here, but Neil LaBute's focus on just-talk between Broderick and co-star Alice Eve, funny but never uproarious, provides its own modest rewards.

Both actors stay sharp through some pretty degrading moments, and if Palmer and screenwriter Tess Morris are bent on serious button-pushing in the closing scenes, at least they garnish it with playfulness and wit.

As she flails through a few dubious choices, the character may be on the kind of self-discovery path we've seen in countless other films; but Winstead makes the outcome seem far from preordained.

[A] semi-convincing yet enjoyable tale, relying on familiar names in a cast that acquits itself well given the demands of the unusual plot.

Director Bao Nguyen doesn't try to dig too deep, leaving serious behind-the-scenes lore to the SNL obsessives who've been poring over backstage accounts for years. Focusing on talking heads, almost all of whom say nice things about their experience of the show, he offers a puffy remembrance just a couple of notches more substantive than the supplemental doc in a DVD box set.

Byington's two-chuckle-a-minute script is mostly interested in Larry's constant, evasive patter, which continues whether the target of his words appears to care what he's saying or not.

Gibney is convincing on every front. And while Apple (big surprise) refused to cooperate — meaning that key players like Jony Ive and Tim Cook are all but invisible in this story — he gets enough of Jobs' collaborators on camera to lend emotional color to the portrait.

It's not nearly funny enough to call a comedy, but its seriousness about her lonely life is undercut by its depiction of her frankly ridiculous behavior.

In the end one would rather be back at one's own computer, tending to the tedious details of digital life, than watching this clique get pinged to death.

The world of In Country may sound like a joke to outsiders, and may well be a misguided hobby for some of its subjects. But the film suggests we'd make a big mistake to write it all off as foolish fantasy.

A thoroughly entertaining doc that serves also as a primer on Brand's shockingly successful comedy career and an introduction to his singular personality.

Coon and Skousen supply just enough information about the boys' post-Raiders lives to satisfy our curiosity.

Katz is much more interested in observing Jake's newfound emotional core — and probably a bit too confident that a moist-eyed Kroll can turn this quite likable but slight family reunion into something more touching.

Dior and I is a fashion doc with both a sense of history and a feel for the energy of a work in progress.

Technically puckish where appropriate but grounded by strong performances from Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, the film is not awards bait but makes some Big Thinker biographies that are look staid.

Of interest to Police fans but hardly a rock-doc for the ages.

Metalhead is uninterested in caricature or easy laughs, and its embodiment of guitar-hero obsession is one much more closely resembling someone you knew in high school, albeit someone who's had an exceptionally hard time dealing with childhood trauma.

A passably silly but lowbrow buddy comedy.

Laugh-stuffed and making excellent use of its marquee-grade supporting cast, it promises to be a home run in its early summer release.

Cutting through many of the easy signifiers found in bad-behavior comedies to get at what it actually feels like to be an intimacy-phobic mess, Trainwreck finds Judd Apatow putting his directing chops in service of Amy Schumer's deeply felt but cracklingly funny screenplay.

A film that (whatever massive efforts were required to work around [Paul Walker's] absence) is as stupendously stupid and stupidly diverting as it could have hoped to be had everything gone as planned.

While the film plays strongly as both mystery and haunted love story, Bush also gets plenty of mileage simply from the drama of one man's attitude toward himself, if such a thing even exists.

Despite an appealing cast, though, neither comedy nor suspense really takes flight until very near the end, largely due to a script that isn't equal to the filmmakers' enthusiasm.

This film complements rather than duplicating the recent fest title "Butterfly Girl," which also refused to settle for generic notions of bravery and endurance to hone in on an individual teen's specific experience of illness.

Bert Marcus offers more sociology than boxing fans may expect, using mean-streets origin stories not just for biographical intrigue but to comment on hardships his subjects faced later in life.

Funny, dark, and riding a very fine line in its depiction of mental illness, it may be the best thing we could hope would emerge from the side of Wiig that gave us Gilly.

A flop-sweaty cash grab that gives a bad name to sequels in which key talent has jumped ship... Viewers who expected nothing from the first but were pleasantly surprised will get burned badly here.

Russell pulled off some outrageous moments in I Heart Huckabees, the feature he made before this film, but the evidence here suggests Nailed had issues even before the money ran out.

Rossier strikes a delicate but credible balance between the former leader's unambiguous statements that he didn't know anything about assassinations and critics' insistence that, even if he didn't specifically give orders, he was "politically and morally responsible."

Sumptuous and romantic in an attractively old-fashioned way despite a hitch designed to give some contemporary American idealists pause -- the writer's lover is married, with no interest in divorce -- the film satisfies in a wholly commercial way.

The doc's structure is a countdown to opening night, but planning goes smoothly enough that little drama accompanies that ticking clock.

Exciting and enlightening, the still-timely film ranks with docs like The Weather Underground in its evocation of a more politically engaged era.

Despite its apparently sincere identification with its protagonist, Entertainment feels like a sick joke.

More lightweight than its ample talk of weighty subjects suggests, the film is nevertheless enjoyable.

Maclean's screenplay is unshowy but keen.

A perfectly chosen cast sells this unhurried comedy, which flows unconventionally but is still, by a long stretch, the most mainstream-friendly picture Bujalski has made.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's Ten Thousand Saints offers both a premise and a setting ripe for nostalgic sentimentality but indulges in little of it.

Goold's work never feels stagey; a smart and varied visual sense opens up even settings as basic as a jail's visiting room. But what happens in that room isn't as convincing as might be expected from these actors.

Benefitting from likeable, good-natured subjects and the peculiar pastimes with which they fill their cooped-up hours, the doc certainly gets us interested in and rooting for the Angulo boys.

A smart-ass charmer, merciless tearjerker and sincere celebration of teenage creativity.

Begins as a marginally fun diversion before proving to have nearly no interest in the possibilities of its premise.

The movie plays quite well for a while but begins to run out of steam in its second half, its occasional laughs not coming quickly enough to keep us interested in the unfolding lore of 19th century murders.

Having downplayed its love story at the start, the picture swells romantically in an unexpectedly pleasing way. It may not be enough to convince audiences that Starr should be Hollywood's next romantic lead, but for these two characters, the chemistry is just right.

Lynskey's performance is sympathetic, but the movie doesn't fully convince us in its dramatization of her responses to Quinn's large and small blunders.

While it offers some provocative moral quandaries, it serves mostly as a showcase for Patrick Stewart.

The pic works best when it's least self-referential, focusing on romantic attractions in many stages of development. Though it won't do for its authors what Swingers and Good Will Hunting did for theirs, Loitering is smartly written enough to further their off-camera careers; thanks to predictably winning performances from Marisa Tomei and Sam Rockwell.

The plot reversals of the third act happen rather abruptly, perhaps unbelievably, in comparison to what precedes them. But those who've been in Margaret's shoes may find this appropriate — an honest acknowledgement of the false starts that can result when a newly hatched idealist tries to apply abstract principles to messy human emotions.

Paul Schneider shines in the role, stumbling through a dating world that has changed since his character got hitched, thanks mostly to social media.

The filmmakers get astonishing access, eventually earning enough trust that they get to visit Guzman's family home and interview his mother, who proudly recalls how fascinated he was with stacks of play money as a child.

In tracing the origins of this restaurant staple, Ian Cheney's The Search for General Tso is as much an immigration history as a culinary one, observing how a people who were demonized as low-wage laborers found entrepreneurial success in small and large towns across the country.

A sober drama that makes class central to the story without ever sounding like it has an agenda.

A quiet stunner of a drama.

The filmmakers prefer, smartly, to focus on the people in present-tense need, making them not statistics to be debated but human stories.

A seemingly well-intentioned but deeply flawed film about dementia that becomes as erratic and misguided as its protagonist, Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman does no favors to those afflicted with cognitive disease or those hoping to understand them.

Berg's film is very tightly focused, examining just one arena of abuse and dutifully addressing only cases in which an accuser is willing to appear on camera.

Subjects Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey are colorful in quite different but complementary ways.

Few who see the picture will fail to be charmed.

While the film suffers from its own occasional sluggishness, it picks up as the lawmen watching our hero grow as strained as he is.

A very funny Kiwi take on vampire lore and its application to the modern world.

Damici more than holds the screen, too gruffly determined to be upstaged by a monster, and the script slips a clever trick or two up his sleeve.

When the gags a movie is most confident in — the ones it uses three or four times, as if they were sure things — involve pushing unsuspecting pedestrians into a bush or riffing on "Bond, James Bond," something's wrong in the yuk factory.

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

Comic subplots are less zany than flatly hopeless, occasionally acting as deflating metaphors for army life.

The tale is surprising, and directors Carlos Aguilo and Mandy Jacobson blaze right through it -- recounting ins and outs across an entire continent in ways that will challenge most viewers in the West.

A thoughtful, emotionally tricky debut benefitting from two strong lead performances.

Less an investigation into or comprehensive summary of the Penn State sex-abuse scandal than a look at the feelings it elicited, Amir Bar-Lev's Happy Valley is more concerned with the phenomenon of team spirit than any single question of fact or moral judgment.

An affecting drama made more poignant by honest-feeling autobiographical elements.

Though the film addresses some questions that remain a sticking point in helping abused women, it sheds little new light on them for viewers who've spent any time thinking about this upsettingly widespread phenomenon.

It's pretty silly stuff, leaving the film to rely on more conventional car chases, woman-in-peril scenarios and mistaken identity to keep things interesting -- all seen on that laptop via security cameras and the like.

Though it doesn't answer every question it raises and may occasionally confuse the uninitiated, the polished film easily stirs indignation.

Intelligently assembled by Lemelson, a UCLA anthropologist, it addresses a Westerner's concerns without condescending to its subjects; though a three-family focus is hardly enough to make an authoritative-feeling portrait.

Cutter Hodierne's Fishing Without Nets is a tense drama with well-drawn characters and only as much action as its story requires.

Offering a silly conceit that requires either finesse on screen or a cast whose magnetism overrides disbelief, Mind has neither.

The film will appeal to art lovers, but some viewers who can hardly tell their Cezannes from Chagalls will find the story fascinating as well.

A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure.

In a movie built on the idea of walking in someone else's shoes, shouldn't learning to see others as more than stereotypes be fairly central to the plot's development?

There's a good deal of pleasure to draw from some of these bonding moments, especially among vets who haven't seen each other for years, but not enough to justify overshadowing the movie's other elements.

Its undiscriminating focus, accepting artists whose degree of talent varies widely, may not help it with audiences seeking a fine-art doc, but many viewers will appreciate that very quality, enjoying this modest effort's celebration of a bootstrappy creative community.

The picture is deeply weird, with an entrancement factor almost entirely dependent on the performance of Michael Parks.

Catherine Gund's Born to Fly works very well as a portrait of a maverick artistic sensibility, even if it will leave some viewers wanting more in terms of performance footage.

Kline remains a pleasure to watch, surviving the character's deepening self-pity and making his suspiciously unwriterly carelessness with words (he refers to the trophy head of a wild boar as a "cow") almost charming.

The city isn't the star of the film, nor is Lehane's excellent dialogue, and neither is Roskam, here making a sure-footed jump to America after his Belgian debut Bullhead. The picture belongs to Tom Hardy, whose astonishingly sensitive performance even the great James Gandolfini steps gently around.

The picture would go nowhere without the friendly chemistry between Lewis and costar Jonny Weston, as the wheelchair-bound high schooler who charms her. If young mothers had any time to go to movies, this one might draw them in droves.

A peculiar and frustrating portrait of a man coping with chronic illness by indulging in carnal and intellectual pleasures, Angela Christlieb's Naked Opera presents itself as a documentary but is unconcerned with answering even the most basic questions viewers will have about its subject.

Being haunted by a ghost here is less like a horror movie than like many of the other secrets teenagers share -- working out matters of life and death that no one around them has a clue about.

Kink is quite convincing in presenting this one workplace as a happy, sane environment where people respect each other and aren't manipulated into doing things they don't ultimately enjoy. But it leaves plenty of room to presume that Kink.com is an outlier in the industry.

The picture's first-person focus makes it surprisingly uninformative and occasionally annoying.

An account of one modern expedition that draws fruitfully upon the lore of another.

Ralph Ziman's Kite repackages an assortment of genre tropes into an instantly forgettable Luc Besson-aping slog that would be unneeded even if Besson hadn't just returned to big action flicks himself.

Visually ravishing, thought-provoking and benefitting from just enough playfulness to set it apart from the nature-doc herd, the film is eco-relevant without being at all dominated by climate change, which is only one of many subjects discussed.

Grashaw's convincing drama distills this underexposed world into the story of a single young man trying to survive a system designed to break him.

Though some plot elements are pushily therapeutic, they're offset by others whose novelty distinguishes Rudderless from movies of its sort.

Less an introduction to the green-burial movement than a portrait of one man who embraced it after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, A Will for the Woods is more sentimental than journalistic.

Though the film's cat-and-mouse scenes hardly compare to those in a Bourne movie, they're enjoyable and only occasionally ridiculous.

A lazy ending mars this fine, if generic, take on a much-loved YA novel.

Aiming for Hitchcockian suspense but coming closer to daytime drama, the film offers only occasional tension.

Though clumsily enacted, the eventual revelation at least avoids the sick-punchline feel afflicting some dramas sharing this theme.

Talking heads aside, the movie gets a big boost from the wealth of news footage and post-standoff reportage the filmmakers cull from archives.

If the three hours of filming Cameron did in the Trench yield little obvious drama, the story of how the Deepsea Challenger reached those depths makes up for it.

Though their resolution is a little too neat to be believed, the filmmakers' way with their cast makes this debut a promising one.