Jordan Mintzer

Although the film’s dark humor and colorful, thriller aesthetics provide some juicy material at the beginning, its overindulgence in chatter, fornication and occasional gore feels too blatant to make Sono’s social commentary run anywhere but skin-deep.

It’s a decent concept for any sort of movie – a thriller, a horror flick, a comedy – but the problem here is that writer-director Joe Martin never quite decides which one he wants to make.

On a dramatic level, Dutch-born helmer Jan Kounen's hyper-stylized, emotionally vacuous film is like a pair of designer pants that look great but don't fit, or a rare vinyl recording that keeps skipping at the best parts.

The canvas may be strewn with glitter and glory, but beneath the surface Syversen provides a chilling look at how religion can be used to ignore deeper personal traumas, convincing youngsters to turn to god when they should perhaps be turning to therapy or something more probing.

The difference here is how explicitly that tragedy appears, whereas the director built much of her best work on nuance and suggestion — on the viewer experiencing events rather than fully grasping them. The Fence features some of that moody allusiveness as well, but ultimately plays like the minor work of a still major filmmaker.

Journey mostly works thanks to Dhanush's radiant charm, with the actor adding humor and sincerity to a project that can feel too overstuffed and wacky for its own good — mixing magical realism, deadpan comedy, musical numbers and moments of tear-jerking drama.

Here the burn can be too slow to handle at times, as if the gas had been forever left at medium-low heat. You're ultimately left wanting more from a movie that tries to drift away from the usual policier template, even though shots are fired and bodies drop.

The film is so refined and filled with good taste, not to mention poetry citations and dialogue rendered with quotations marks, that it often feels inert.

It’s perhaps too focused on the Reichsfuhrer’s personal life... while the director’s decision to add sound effects to silent images sometimes feels uncalled for.

Thompson’s heavy-handed storytelling, along with a nonstop score of pure mush, brings this closer to telenovela territory than to the Louvre.

An exhausting pièce d’indulgence from the veteran video/feature director, who can never quite shape all the bric-a-brac, not to mention an all-star Gallic cast, into a workable whole.

Despite its late shortcomings, Going Away demonstrates Garcia’s ability to coax strong performances out of a relatively young cast.

The film is more of a character study than a full-fledged family drama, though one that benefits from strong, naturalistic performances by castmembers that seem to know one another all too well.

It’s got a nervously eerie feel to it that’s grounded in Canet’s gripping turn as a dad out to do good for his estranged family.

Becky tends to work best when it revels in the blood-splattered set pieces of its script (written by Ruckus Skye, Lane Skye and Nick Morris), going that extra mile and a half in the gore department (special effects makeup was by Karlee Morse) to create some truly disgusting moments, albeit ones that are laced with a grim sense of humor.

Cage chews up every scene he’s in and seems to be having a blast — he’s always over-the-top and never boring to watch, in a film that delivers the goods for those who like him best when he’s just about lost his mind.

Like his other recent films, this one isn’t easy to sit through, though it’s definitely original and, per custom, impeccably made. You can accuse Dumont of many things, including testing the viewer’s patience, but at least he hasn’t sold out yet and gone over to the dark side.

Victoria is definitely what you would call a passive protagonist, and although the film subtly explores questions of ethnic identity, it doesn't necessarily keep one engaged until the end.

As anachronistic as A Paris Education may seem (a running time of 136 minutes doesn’t always help matters, either), there’s a conviction to the storytelling that can’t be denied, and no matter what your tastes are, it’s hard not to be moved by Etienne’s struggle to find his voice amid so much doubt and disillusion.

Neither funny enough as an outright comedy nor solid enough as a drama, and certainly not believable as an affaire de coeur.

Instead of taking us in, Black Tea gently pushes us away, even if the world depicted is certainly one worth exploring.

If the "ghost" of anime classic Ghost in the Shell refers to the soul looming inside of its killer female cyborg, then this live-action reboot from director Rupert Sanders really only leaves us the shell: a heavily computer-generated enterprise with more body than brains, more visuals than ideas, as if the original movie’s hard drive had been wiped clean of all that was dark, poetic and mystifying.

Silence is both the film’s main asset and its principal limitation, creating moments of suspense but also leaving us in the dark, to the point that it feels more like a gimmick than anything substantial.

The result feels more like a B-grade thriller that’s been elevated by a good cast and a script with some clever moves.

Girls of the Sun (Les Filles du soleil) is at once mildly harrowing and completely over-the-top, intermittently intense yet so unsubtle it winds up doing damage to its own worthy discourse.

Clever and giddily entertaining ... Hazanavicius is smart enough to apply an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach, keeping nearly everything intact except for the language and cast.

An old-fashioned, Robin Hood-style revenge tale that favors self-serious storytelling over action and suspense, Arnaud des Pallieres’ Michael Kohlhaas provides a few quick thrills and some beautifully photographed landscapes, but never really convinces as an intellectual’s swords-and-horses period piece.

Eric Hannezo’s debut feature showcases some skill in the craft department, but remains a strictly B-level enterprise in terms of content.