Joshua Rothkopf

Out of Darkness is effective enough — and gory — to function as a thriller of the loud-noise-springing variety. But a last-act grasp at profundity in Ruth Greenberg’s screenplay feels unearned.

Yet after the actorcentric fireworks of Cianfrance’s "Blue Valentine" (2010), it’s impressive to see him going after a wider sociopolitical scope, one that would have been better served by a less repetitive structure.

The film gets so many exquisite details just right—the vacuous party guests, Hayek’s slightly self-righteous pose, the happy clink of the wine glasses—that it’s a letdown to realize the movie doesn’t have a proper ending. You take it home with you and argue about it.

A film this well-made and cut (the pacy editing by Aden Hakimi calls back to the elder Romero’s own cutting of his major titles) shouldn’t be relegated to just one kind of audience. Anyone who appreciates horror should find something to smile at here.

A horror movie that should have been a lot more fun.

A sumptuous romantic epic that's too polished for its own good.

Marcia Gay Harden is the picture’s treasure; watching her swell with concern at her daughter’s choices, you understand how hard it is to let go.

The question of winning Ann sexually takes on an ugly character, and the film dumbs down fast. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a wimp.

If I call the movie a love story, don’t laugh. Torres has made it with love in his heart.

When Kriegman is heard at a Weiner low point asking, “Why did you let me film this?” you’re glad the question is asked. But there’s no answer: The narcissism is all up there onscreen, but shame will have to wait for the sequel.

Into Eternity has the grandeur of ominous suggestion, but might have benefitted from a director more creatively unbound-an Errol Morris ready to play around at the end of the world.

Shutter Island is slumming: minor but enjoyably nuts.

Raw, messy and unkempt (as a domestic cancer drama should be), Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly’s feature debut is also a woe-is-me gay rom-com, a showdown between siblings and—at its best—an out-and-proud minimusical. If that sounds like too much, it is.

An uneven but fascinating spectacle.

Workman’s study, complete with a fawning sit-down with Steven Spielberg, feels slightly awestruck: The films certainly deserve it, but you’ll want more of Welles’s Illinois schoolmate, rolling her eyes when the subject is described as “humble.”

What elevates Halloween beyond mere fan service is the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, whose willowy Laurie Strode has been converted, Sarah Connor–style, into a shotgun-toting shut-in with more than a hint of crazy about her.

Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.

The Family Fang goes deep into dysfunction, but even more impressively, it smuggles in the daredevilish art theories of the late Chris Burden and his ilk.

The doc's straining for a larger, Varda-esque metaphor about the sad humans on the sidelines is ill-advised.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and a ratlike Paul Giamatti are the competing spin doctors - you wish the whole movie were about them. And Marisa Tomei brings a hungry sense of scoopmaking to the (unavoidable?) role of a New York Times journalist who's seen it all.

The movie you were hoping to avoid.

Swaddled with a lacquer of nostalgia that passes for cultural insight, this one-night-in-sweatpants drama will make you yearn for a moratorium on teen movies-at least ones so aggressively dewy-eyed.

But when it’s being dumb enough to have Charlotte drop molly and space out in an impromptu war room during a crisis, it has just the right amount of irreverence, thanks to fun performances (including one by O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Fred’s superwealthy friend, cruising on a LaCroix-fueled cloud of serenity).

Working from autobiographical material, Sebastián Silva does wonders with these two dedicated performances — the ice king and the earth goddess, both of them neurotically detached from their sunny surroundings.

If only the script had been content to stick with its let's-start-a-band verve. Like many a musical biopic, Nowhere Boy wants to explain away the man (as if a song like "In My Life" weren't explanation enough).

Safety Not Guaranteed doesn't quite know what kind of comedy it wants to be; the humor works best in its first hour, when the news-of-the-weird plot takes on a suggestive dimension of romantic desperation.

Unlike recent, sharp-witted examples like The Lego Movie and Paddington, there’s zero interest in mocking or freshening up the material—think what Wes Anderson might have done with this—thus dooming the movie to nostalgic types only. It trudges along like that black, jagged stripe on our hero’s yellow polo: up and down, scene by scene.

The movie is a coming-of-age story, but whose age is coming? That's the profound question we're left with, in a stellar adaptation that balances gore with black humor, ethical quandary, hope and—yes—plenty of brains.

Hipsters is also a musical (in an intentionally naive "Absolute Beginners" vein), and while everything looks glinty and gorgeous, the story's political edge is dulled by excessive levity.

Ultimately, points may be scored on the balance sheet of workplace exploitation - usually we see it go the other way around, gender-wise - but these conference-room banalities have been better explored elsewhere, and the effort here feels like a rough draft.

Michael Jackson was obviously shooting for the moon right before his death, as you can tell from these stunning bits of concert spectacle.

It all feels a touch schematic, trying to satisfy every audience type, when each haircut is different. Barbershop: The Next Cut actually ends up in the chair, with a highly symbolic snipping that could have come straight outta the 1950s.

The mood of this movie will brew with you for a while, even if it swirls around characters who aren't quite persuasive.

Barreling toward its rapidly modernizing future, China takes Internet addiction more seriously than most nations: To watch Web Junkie, an often scary yet half-realized documentary, is to see a society trapped in its old solutions.

Once A Simple Favor hits the first of several I-can’t-believe-they-went there moments (there are a few too many), it loses some of its lure, and Feig never quite regains tonal control. But you won’t be bored by this.

Ultimately, the returns of the film's premise can't justify a nearly two-and-a-half-hour squirm. The savagery is honest, raw and hardly entertainment.

There's still tremendous vitality here, and Wheatley's avoidance of yet another Guy Ritchie gabfest is a pleasure in itself.

The esteemed director, Ken Loach, isn’t really a fantasist--and it shows.

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

Indeed, the doc works best as a relationship study, filled with endearing moments of intimate bickering. Takei is a self-admitted ham but a playful one, projecting his confidence in increasingly meaningful directions.

Though play with fire she might, couldn't screenwriter Jonas Frykberg have played with a little button called DELETE? There's no reason why a two-hour movie should feel like three, nor require quite so much fidelity to Larsson's plot curlicues.

As exposed as the actors allow themselves to be, their mostly improvised script never takes them anywhere, and the rough edge of their banter seems to acknowledge as much. At least they get to eat.

Bland, artless and unoriginal, it's a horror sequel as faceless as its mask-wearing killers.

As with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.

The movie strays too far into fantasy - Abe suffers mightily - but Solondz still has an ear and an eye for a specific hell in the real world.

impressively, the movie compensates with some fascinating father-son Drago tensions, the Russian oligarchs swarming, redemption at hand.

Ben Is Back has seriousness in mind, but too much showmanship in the making.

En route to the harshest, most unremittingly bleak film of his career, Solondz unleashes some of his sharpest commentary on human mortality and regret.

The story is a little slight compared to the grand romantic ache of Pride and Prejudice, but Beckinsale and Stillman do their inspiration proud: Finally, a Jane Austen movie that's fresh and deliciously rotten at the same time.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s deceptively shallow but ultimately fascinating latest, is animated by that spirit of we-don’t-give-a-f**k playfulness.

In its early scenes, Dinosaur 13 works nearly as well as a certain Steven Spielberg thriller, creating the giddy, ominous mood of past and present colliding in excitement.

There are occasional visual flourishes — a nightmarish PowerPoint presentation ending with a slide about mock burials — that hint at the better-balanced film The Report might have been. But mainly we’re pinned down by a firehose-stream of didactic outrage.

The film feels naive for an audience that's ready for some harder truths.

The general takeaway, occasionally swaddled in pot clouds and boisterous laughter, is that verse-slinging requires serious thought and planning.

Apart from one muted action sequence in which the participants try not to wake a sleeping bundle of joy (“Put that baby down,” one of them demands, and the order is obeyed, with a little tucking in), there’s scarce humor here for adults to relish. And Samberg’s characteristic snark has been sanded down to a nub.

For 
the most part, you’re in the hands of a capable lunatic who has a tale to tell.

An oblique history of ’80s disarmament laden with revealing off-camera asides, The Reagan Show makes the glossy surface profound. It’s the most crucial and unique doc of the moment, apart from the one that’s unfolding on the news every night.

For those of us who find somber superhero movies faintly ridiculous, Kick-Ass is a one-film justice league.

Cigarettes are sucked hungrily by all involved, old and young, in the trashscape of this depressing Australian crime film - a movie that heaps so much dank atmosphere on its suburbanites, you can't help but sigh with relief when events turn to serial killing (finally?).

Notably undisciplined for a Pixar plot, it feels like a lot of heavy lifting to get to the same old lessons about kinship and finding your clan.

Diallo, an inspired stylist with bold things to say, strikes the balance between thrills and ills in a way that's wholly her own.

Another Earth is a movie you take home and write your own ending to.

The movie is nostalgia, pure and simple, unfettered by examination. Even its title is fuzzy and vague.

Breathtaking imagery competes with a scary lack of human interest in this hypnotic, potentially alienating documentary.

On the whole, it's passable stuff, a surprise, given how mechanical the masked character seemed.

A punk call-to-arms about being yourself, this Joan Jett documentary vibrates with attitude and a true spirit of independence.

The whole movie aches from tired blood.

Marshall isn’t as flashy as it ought to be.

Such is Kim’s plotty momentum that the whole thing feels like an extreme joke made of pained silences, one that somehow strips bare the subtext of overbearing parents. Meryl Streep herself couldn’t improve on it.

The Way Back then takes its time, creeping through gorgeous locations in Bulgaria, Morocco and Pakistan, and basically feeling like a two-hour-plus version of the desert scene from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

There's too much coyness about the implicit romance across the table; several other tensions concerning female independence go mostly unexplored. But the film's quiet focus on a woman's anxiety is not unwelcome.

The Infiltrator works best when it owns its Miami Vice–esque sizzle: Composer Chris Hajian breaks out the percolating Jan Hammer synthesizers, and the ’80s decadence wafts offscreen like a stink.

This film could have done with a few more mouth beats and unlikely moments of extracurricular celebrity.

Emily Blunt is hypnotically charming in the year's sweetest surprise—a big-hearted contact high.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

Time to fire up the critical Black & Decker: Somebody-there are six credited screenwriters-really wasn't clear on the concept.

There’s social satire for those who want it — don’t tell the rest of the neighborhood our daughter’s risen from the dead! — and a fine, simmering sense of apocalypse that turns this suburban community into a war zone. Still, it’s a lot of heavy lifting for what amounts to “he’s just not that into you,” mainly because you’re as ripe as a cadaver.

The movie's real asset is Reynolds himself, utilizing his comedy chops for unexpected levity.

Kuhns makes time for political insights, provocative montages of race riots cut with the movie’s hick militia, and the comments of owlish Romero himself, who recounts the shoot like the enthusiastic 27-year-old he was.

The sincere director, Oliver Schmitz, injects too much movie into his movie; life (above all) would have been enough.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

The film captures a few surprising similarities to the West: One dead-eyed club kid says she’s “tired of everything,” while a hopeful young actor seems to be trying out for her own reality show, breaking down in front of her estranged mother. The experiment isn’t more than a slice of life, but at least it’s a generous one.

It plays like one of Linklater’s most intimate gifts, an adult rumination on the tricky subject of patriotism.

Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.

So even though the science fair was something your other classmates did while you mastered Pitfall!, the sights in Whiz Kids will no doubt stir you.

There’s a whiff of inconsequence to Reitman’s take, fizzy and watchable though it is. It should be about the stealth weaponization of outrage (and of women)—a tragedy that’s leagues more sophisticated that this.

There's lots of volume in these tunes--the soundtrack is killer--and at least everyone gets their rocks off.

Saving Mr. Banks turns Travers’s tense collaboration with Walt and his team of Imagineers into — naturally — a schmaltzy journey of closure, climaxing in a teary screening of the finished musical.

Sally Hawkins cruises into her new movie the same way she did her breakthrough, "Happy-Go-Lucky."

You feel for the potential Wesleyan parent who asks an administrator if his daughter is going to have to move home after graduating: His question is met with an uneasy pause. Crucial stuff.

Monsters University aces a two-part test—first, appealing to kids with gorgeous, hyperrealistic animation that teases out every pink hair on a beastly art student; then luring in parents with several knowing jokes about strumming your guitar on the quad or playing beer pong.

Crisply and efficiently, we're transported to the realm of the kidnapping thriller--and if Brit writer-director J Blakeson knew how to sustain tension for another hour and change, we'd be heralding the next Jonathan "Sexy Beast" Glazer.

The movie ultimately feels both too glib and too hermetically sealed to resonate beyond its chaotic interiors.

Some viewers might give the movie a few extra points for its retro vibe of taciturn badassedness. But little punctures the wall of emotional remove-the pulse rate is way too controlled for entertainment's sake.

When the movie remembers to be the drug-spiked, hard-R comedy you hope for, it’s more than just a fun romp (and, incidentally, superior to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," the rom-com from which its Britpop libertine spins off).

The images wash over you - lush, gorgeous, impeccably framed - just as they did in Ron Fricke's wordless meditation "Baraka" (1992).

The movie looks beautiful, its sublime b&w cinematography signaling a fading dream. And there are touching moments here that you rarely see in docs about professional musicians or celebrities in general.

Tyrannosaur won't translate into entertainment, nor as a wake-up call to the dark side of humanity - though it does work nicely as a tart slice of hard-bitten acting; the entire cast is superb.

For a sci-fi indie of vast ambition but limited means, Coherence does a sterling job with coherence.

Let’s credit debuting feature director Arkasha Stevenson (a former photographer for this paper) with the stylishness to pull off a potent sense of atmosphere and the kind of lovely period detail that deep studio pockets can fund but rarely have cause to summon.

Generation P is worth struggling through, even if it boggles you. In many ways, it's a keyhole into the future of the entire world.

Night Catches Us surges awkwardly in its latter third, suddenly aware that a promising setup isn't enough. Regardless, here is an honorable attempt to address a complex chapter of African-American pride, one that's usually hidden under hairdos and wah-wah pedals.

Charmless and histrionic, this mean-spirited movie takes place in the toyscape of McG (Charlie's Angels), a monomonikered director who makes Michael Bay seem thoughtful.

The Rover is almost worth it for the coiled central performance of Guy Pearce, who outfuries Mel Gibson with his pinpoint shotgun skills and monomaniacal quest.

Just as soon as that rarest Lebowskian blend of casual pursuit and big-world conspiracy begins to emerge from the fog, Cold Weather appears to lose its nerve (or run out of money).

Brie Larson isn't given enough to do in a Marvel movie that marinates in '90s nostalgia but doesn't quite rise to the occasion of its own significance.

Blessed with an improbable-but-true story that functions on many ironic levels, this clever documentary ultimately conveys more about the complex American character - shifting between intimacy and criminality - than a whole shelf of fiction films.

West holds your interest with material that should feel like a rip-off of The Shining. If this is mere placeholding until something more ambitious comes along for the rising director, it'll do.

The script, partly credited to Lost's Damon Lindelof, is so filled with talky lectures about divinity (and boner plot holes) that you realize, with embarrassment, that Scott, at age 74, wants to join the cosmic company of Terrence Malick. Does he not think that making a drum-tight horror film was ambitious enough?

Sometimes, the debunking is overshadowed by cringe-inducing graphics involving pills with little legs running toward a finish line.

Cry foul, you documentary purists, but narration by Jena Malone and others pulls the gamble off. The film makes its point ingeniously.

The material is worthy, but this continuing struggle deserves a more nuanced take.

Closer to a special episode of "Diff’rent Strokes" than to "12 Years a Slave," the movie seems to exist to give its white characters belated moments of conscience.

It’s only hours afterward that Guadagnino’s film will cohere for you and yield its buried treasures: the bonds of secret sorority, the strength of a line of dancers moving like a single organism, the present rippling with the muscle memory of the past. It’s so good, it’s scary.

A ridiculously infantile film, one that flatters itself by intimating a deeper comment about suppressed masculinity or romantic passivity.

As games go, this one’s a little too easy to outfox, but it’s worth playing if you need a quick diversion, or if the chess moves of The Favourite felt overly vicious—Ready or Not is pure checkers.

It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine, the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

Best are the film's tender ghostly visitations from Dad, evoked with a minimum of artiness, and the authentic, impoverished locations.

As medium-grade satire (hardly another The Truman Show), Downsizing works fine enough. But it makes a series of wrong moves that throw off the delicate tone, raising the pretension levels to toxic.

Ruffalo, a master of rumpled befuddlement, finds his signature role here—it can't be overstated how deftly he eases into the tricky creation, a blue-blooded slacker who aches when the world won't hug him back.

Cheadle is so good as the cryptic Davis—coiled to strike, soulful, wounded, boldly outspoken—that you wonder if a more traditionally structured biojazz picture à la Ray or Bird might have been a better showcase for what's obviously a passion project.

And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.

One of [Moore's] more hopeful and celebratory efforts.

It's a quietly witty film, much like the dude himself.

A timid, far-from-revelatory film, authorized by the three surviving Zeppelin vets and graced by their presence in new interviews that give off the faint scent of impatience.

St. Vincent has nothing on Rushmore, an obvious forebearer, even though it strains for the same egalitarian spirit of thrown-together family, one that includes a pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts) and a sympathetic but firm Catholic schoolteacher (Chris O’Dowd).

It’s a portrait that’s equal parts shtick and soul — in other words, exactly what "The Love Guru" should have been.

Built out of complex performances etched with economic flair, unobtrusive camera work and the faintest tinge of comic whimsy (the film’s score, by Japanese trumpeter Jun Miyake, is marvelous), Norman is an intimate film that simply has no drawbacks.

Still, the problem that often fells these documentaries - humorlessness - has been licked: Jack Black makes an exuberant cameo pitching recycled toilet water (his fake brand is called Porcelain Springs). Sound gross? Open wide, because it's on the menu for all of us.

Brace yourself and go see it.

The film is set in a celeb-owned Miami restaurant and many of the gags--exploding entrees, the swallowing of a diamond ring, on-the-job drunkenness--feel like leftovers.

Return is almost too underdramatized to seem like a piece of today's zoomy entertainment, but its anxieties-the bare cupboards, the vague sense of purposelessness-are at the heart of the American experience for many. It's what indie filmmaking ought to be.

Love Crime soon plummets into a flashback-laden mess, a shame since it was marginally stronger as a psychosexual game of dominance.

In theory, there's nothing wrong when a movie reminds you of TV. (That's where the fun is, anyway.) But when a movie resembles a long-lost, corduroy-clad episode of "The Rockford Files," that's a problem.

Subtle performances — especially from Bale and Affleck, both growing meaner in the absence of hope — transcend any structural weaknesses. The bottom drops out early for them, but their endgame is savagely captivating.

This is another dinner conversation that races and lingers, making you want to do more with your own life.

A smart horror film will fatten its pigs before the slaughter, and the mock doc The Last Exorcism feeds its prize hog nicely.

Material like this doesn't require the additional strain of overnarrated freeze-frames, a "Cuckoo's Nest" supporting cast of adorable crazies and a Glee-ified musical number set to Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure."

Unpacks the man's story with a dramatic flair that might be mistaken for Zoolanderiffic, if it weren't so aptly accessible.

You watch Dafoe's intelligent hands skillfully setting traps, building fires and squeezing triggers, and wonder if an entire movie might be made of such manly components. Probably not.

If you can stomach the fear, go. Confident hands created this film. Its nightmare lingers for weeks.

Russell Crowe's pained vocal stylings (they sound more like barks) as relentless Inspector Javert can be forgiven after hearing Hugh Jackman's old-pro fluidity in the central role of Jean Valjean, hiding a criminal past.

Not since a Nam-scarred Sly Stallone asked, "Do we get to win this time?" in "Rambo: First Blood Part II" has an American action star been deployed to rewrite history so thoroughly.

This recut version appends a new interview with Polanski and Stewart, returning to the same hotel room to wax nostalgic. Essentially, they liked going fast and big; this film feels slow and minor.

Spring Breakers is either an inspired satire of the youth movie or the most irresponsible comedy mainstream Hollywood will never make. The bros in your crowd will call it rad — and radical it is.

Puiu offers zero insight into his character; only suckers will find the pose artful or nourishing. Skip it.

Split trots out many of Shyamalan’s pet moves (it’s amazing how well we know this filmmaker), including his tendency to infuse genre nonsense with the deeper trauma of child abuse.

The film works best during its (too-brief) getting-to-know-you section, which balances humor against snarly danger.

A too-pleased-with-itself action comedy.

Resurrections does eclipse its predecessors for full-on, kick-you-in-the-heart romance: Reeves and Moss, comfortable with silences, lean into an adult intimacy, so rare in blockbusters, that's more thrilling than any roof jump (though those are pretty terrific too). Their motorbiking through an exploding city, one of them clutching the other, could be the most defiantly sexy scene of a young year.

Never is the material excited into the kind of playful uncertainty that Rivette all but trademarked; the inertness of the performances robs the movie of spirit.

Utterly inessential, this slightly cheap-looking reboot of the Turtles franchise is froth too — it might even be too tame for the kids who make up the target audience.

Superfans aren’t necessarily going to love this. It’s a movie made with affection, but also with the wisdom that visionaries can sometimes be jerks.

Given the keys to the franchise and a role in the writing, Black has massively upped the verbal sparring and kept the broad inventiveness of comic-book malleability in mind. “I’m a mechanic,” Stark says to the boy in a moment of self-doubt. That’s 100% Black, that line, a tidy code of craft, and the jitters pass.

The style of the film, lush and traditional, is nothing special, but the takeaway, a daily struggle for dignity, is impossibly moving.

It feels too flabby for the company it keeps.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are unusually committed to maritime mechanics, and the excitement grows as steadily as the sailors’ beards.

Parents will feel heard by this movie in a way that few other films have tried. Everyone else should go for the kid, who's a rocket taking off. You want to be able to say you were there when it happened.

For all its episodic, gleeful inappropriateness, the movie Klown most resembles - not that it tries to or anything - is Alexander Payne's half-soused flight from maturity, "Sideways."

For all its updated bluster, this update still can’t escape the shadow of 1933’s magical King Kong.

Director Morley has at least restored something of a soul to her subject.

Unfortunately, the draggy movie is one thing definitively, and that’s exactly like all of Reggio’s other films. His formal devices haven’t changed in 30 years, and the po-faced presentation, once hypnotically strange and cosmic, now feels like an overused gimmick.

More shakily, Payne’s obvious pathology isn’t probed as deeply as it should be. A jaunty musical score smooths over what might have been a tougher profile about an expert liar, to self included.

The sequences in Micmacs are contorted too: impressive and bendy and aggressively shallow.

Entertainingly, the klezmer-scored Deli Man charts the history of urban eateries, nowhere near as prominent as they were during the early 20th century but still a vital link to Yiddish-accented comforts.

Destroyer is a movie that confuses Kidman’s unmodulated funk for actual depth. In fairness, a brooding depression may be the reality of much police work, but onscreen it plays like a two-hour murder of our patience.

Writer-director Laura Colella hasn’t strayed far from home (these characters are her actual housemates, rechristened into fiction), but her project feels like a casual experiment gone wonderfully right.

A cute suitor shows up at Natia’s side with the gift of a pistol (for her protection, he insists), and you wait in vain for it to go off. Rather, the fireworks come in last-act shouting bouts, sincere if slightly disappointing.

The film's mood is so somber and minimal, it might be confused for deep. Had the plot (meager and one-last-job-predictable) zipped along, that wouldn't feel like such a problem.

As with so many modern fantasy films, the sequences here seem designed to go viral on YouTube in a flash of coolness, not necessarily linger in the mind or heart.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn, the prankster of last year's "Bronson," has never reduced his craft to such a sledgehammer of minimalism. Electric guitars drone on the soundtrack, bones crunch, and a mystical religiosity gathers around One-Eye; there's a midnight cult here for those who yearn for one.

It's here, in a keenly captured Forest Hills, Queens, land of low-lit bars and manicured lawns, that Roadie soars as a gently comic drama about living the dream - or trying to.

All the way back to "Donnie Darko," Jake Gyllenhaal has had an inchoate sense of evolution about him, a tricky quality that better actors can’t pull off half as well. So it’s hard to say if splitting the star into two doppelgängers — Adam, a mousy college professor, and Anthony, a rising actor with a healthy ego — is the best dramatic plan.

The whole film seems dead set against offering up any kind of salaciousness. Like the overly arty "Zoo" and other indie experiments, it misses the point in a disturbing way.

You sense the Demme-esque working-class comedy that might have been.

The happy surprise, however, is that McKay has seasoned the meat in satisfying ways, salting it with wince-sharp performances and an almost experimental style of editing that creates an apocalyptic whirlwind. For those reasons alone, Vice feels particularly timely.

Lane, experiencing her career heyday, is sweet enough to have you rooting for her, even if her journey to the winner's circle is an odds-on favorite.

None of it makes any sense, except within the high-octane logic of blowing stuff up onscreen. And, in case you’re wondering, sometimes that can be entertainment enough: Slack-jawed euphoria shoots like nitro through the film. (Please be careful in the parking lot afterward.)

Extract, for all its surface reminders of Judge’s 1999 cult hit, "Office Space" (it’s set around a suburban bottling plant), shows its maker taking the smallest step toward lesser comic matters of infidelity and bong abuse. It feels slightly beneath him. That’s not to say you should skip it.

There’s comfort to be had in executing on such a durable formula, and—life lessons accompanied by Coldplay’s treacly “Fix You” aside—Abominable usually resembles the swift adventure it wants to be.

A typically lax late-period Ferrara work, far from the glories of "King of New York."

Maybe because the band enjoyed raves for its daring 2004 psychodrama, Some Kind of Monster, an experimental narrative is shoehorned in, involving a roadie (Dane DeHaan) doing bloody battle in a deserted city. Your heart sinks with every cutaway.

Watch the director's 1976 "The Tenant," and you'll know he can do more with less.

The film plays like something Boyle could kick out in his sleep, all his supercool devices listlessly deployed in service of a mediocre wet dream.

Splattery, puncture-heavy violence — the hard-R rating is earned — alternates with deadening rafts of therapy-speak, including an actual therapy session. But there's no deeper meaning to any of it; the Scream idea, meta to its core, was always a preening celebration of its own cleverness, never mind the occasional half-explored nods to toxic fandom or cancel culture.

The fine cast takes the movie as far as it will comfortably go, until Bahrani gets a case of Great American Play–itis.

Renner and scientist Rachel Weisz are sympathetic enough (although lacking in Matt Damon's all-American approachability), and the movie flies along briskly.

“Stories heal, stories hurt,” we hear in voiceover, and while any horror film would unavoidably literalize such a claim, this one can’t hold a candle to the power of the page, as read by a thirty, ghoulish mind.

It exists in fits and starts: a Blade Runner–esque moment of rainy contemplation on a hotel balcony; some weird sexual tension with a lizard girl (statuesque Svetlana Khodchenkova) who steals away Wolverine’s healing powers.

Given the dreck we’ve seen this summer, it’s nice to be reminded of the virtues of clean storytelling and cultural curiosity.

From its title on, Come Undone is as dully generic as is imaginable.

Stunning, eerily atmospheric.

Dan Stevens turns in a vibrant comic performance as Charles Dickens in this drama about writerly inspiration that plays like a smarter Shakespeare in Love.

This can't be a faithful facsimile of the literary phenomenon currently turning soccer moms into Scandinoir crackheads. Nor can ethical journalist Mikael (Nyqvist), an uncoverer of conspiracies, actually be the dull, Windbreakered nonaction hero onscreen.

It turns out it’s okay to cross streams: Here’s a summer movie starring a girl squad proud of its big brains and tacky jumpsuits. You could call that a supernatural event in itself.

Seeing as how Kill the Messenger comes down firmly on the side of Webb’s truth, it’s unfortunate that his discoveries are only confirmed via the end credits. Missing from the action, too, is the merest hint of our hero’s demise by suicide in 2004. These aspects should have been better showcased; as is, it’s not the whole story.

Trumbo goes for a tone that’s more scrappy and inspirational, as this ousted ex-A-lister enlists his kids as couriers, builds a network of collaborators and wins two Academy Awards undercover.

Visually dull and intriguing in only the most generic sense, but still a showcase for the twin talents of Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.

You outsmart the movie way too soon.

While the new movie is laced with Easter eggs and homages to the late master, it doesn't build its sequences with the same meat-and-potatoes solidity as Craven did. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett don't have those chops yet.

Generation "Home Alone", now grown up and maybe with children of its own, will be amused in the moment, but the film’s heart isn’t as subversive as it wants us to believe.

Yet it’s rare that we get a movie this municipally minded and Chinatown-ish, and Norton invents new elements with a free hand, including a Harlem turf war, a skittering jazz undercurrent (the music is by Daniel Pemberton) and a love interest in Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Alec Baldwin, playing a powerful urban planner, makes for a ferocious Robert Moses stand-in.

Saw X may not be the best one to start off with, but it’s hard to imagine a better one to end with.

Rules Don’t Apply flies along at an inhuman speed; the edits are sharp, skipping years at a time, and the production values are unshowy. Like everything this star-director has done, the film is deceptively smart. It’s just a little too late to the game.

Predictably, the documentary got a rousing reception at hipster-laden SXSW; real people might find it a touch easy.

The ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you’ll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird.

Between epic bouts of bickering, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham save the world in an offshoot that gets the job done.

Superb limb-erasing effects and lush cinematography are bonuses, though not so much the cloying presence of American Idol's Carrie Underwood.

This one belongs to the women: As a gold-digging mistress, Isla Fisher does half-smart expertly, while Jennifer Aniston demonstrates her underrated timing as a wealthy kidnapping victim turned confidante.

When a movie is this predicated on aping the Coen brothers (effectively, it should be added, in fits and starts), surprise won't be its strong suit.

The hard fact, though, is that Harlin's instincts - always toward the massive and slo-mo - make him a fairly dunderheaded political analyst.

Add to the list of actors who, beautifully and boldly, go it alone in their own survival movies the name Blake Lively. Do it without laughing, because she’s the shark here: Even though The Shallows, a tremendously entertaining bit of fluff, pits her against a computer-generated great white, the poor creature never stands a chance.

Based on Amy Koppelman’s 2008 novel, I Smile Back can’t shake its slightly tired structural similarities to other drug dramas, and there’s an obvious imbalance between Silverman’s mighty commitment and the movie around her.

When Sarah's Key leans into the horror (as it should), it's harrowing. Alas, that's only half the time.

You could call it fan service, if the service is to teach fans that mimicking Stanley Kubrick’s chilly elegance—and even reshooting scenes from the original film with lookalike actors, a crime bordering on sacrilege—doesn’t make your take nearly as scary.

J. Edgar is infuriatingly coy and noncritical about its subject, an undeniable patriot but also an alarmist and a ruiner of lives.

The casting is spectacularly wrong, and even on its own scant merits, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's screenplay has little insight into apocalyptic licentiousness, barring a tart line or two.

The precedent for a movie like this is Ang Lee’s bruised "The Ice Storm," but whereas that film sprung from a novel that burns with indictment, Julia Dyer’s effort — scripted by her late sister, Gretchen — is a more open-ended affair and slightly unsatisfying for it.

Here's a film that definitely wants to play Hollywood dress-up.

When the movie is doing its tough-guy-seeking-redemption thing, it’s more than just good.

There’s fascination in watching the always-intense Michael Shannon burrow into the singer’s interiority—he plays Elvis like a bored icon who’s outlived his usefulness. Spacey’s Nixon is a variation on his devious Frank Underwood, not in itself a bad thing.

The effort - by Vedder & Co., as well as Crowe - is heroic, if not quite persuasive. Legends aren't made of longevity alone, and while you wouldn't wish Kurt Cobain's pain on anyone, you can't help but feel this band survived well past its meaning.

This time, Stone is just sloshing around in the shallow end. When John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro show up for extended, cartoonish dialogues, you'll wonder what year it is, and let out a sigh of relief that the moment is long gone.

A certain Hollywood self-absorption is on display here, but the family’s depressing story merits Mariel’s vigilant defensiveness.

While slickly enjoyable in parts, the biggest misstep here comes by puncturing Spielberg’s grandeur.

To the movie's small credit, there's very little grasping for larger significance: It's a dumb horror film, complete with a sexy female lust object (Kaboom's Mesquida) undraping for a shower scene.

A completely unnecessary sequel, plays a lot like "The Godfather, Part III"-lush, self-parodic and cut adrift from urgency.

A full-bodied and mischievous autobiography in the spirit of Federico Fellini’s "Amarcord," Alejandro Jodorowsky’s return to filmmaking after 28 years of financial frustration explodes with great ideas.

Even though Unfriended begins to cheat, springing loud noises and gory cutaways that can’t be explained, there’s a rigor to its dopey, blood-simple conception that you might smile at.

It all comes down to the Big Birthday Party and a furious bike ride, which he's clearly done before, in "The 40 Year Old Virgin."

The new movie is simpler plotwise (a race to the Fountain of Youth), while at the same time being somehow more deadening.

To the Wonder is arty for sure, but for the first time, its maker is working with anxieties we all feel. Let’s hope this Malick sticks around for a while.

Even as it drifts into narrative indiscipline, you appreciate the movie’s attempt to make sense of a troubled, beclowned present.

Course-correcting to some degree with the return of its most inspired director, Justin Lin’s latest F&F instalment is a little too plastic at times, but back on track.

Director David Cronenberg - who knows a thing or two about bodily expressions - understands, finally, what to do with the Twilight star, turning his zombified handsomeness into a stark canvas upon which we can project our own anxieties.

Giggles, not belly laughs, come frequently, and it’ll help if viewers love U.K. comics.

It gets bogged down in slo-mo indie quirk when it should be faster, more in our face.

Glib, underdeveloped dreck.

A committed Denzel Washington is wasted in a legal drama that never gets around to making closing arguments.

Al Pacino’s done so much Acting over the last 25 years (hoo-ah), it’s disquieting to see him digging deep again—often with subtlety—into a rich role with hidden depths.

Breathtakingly risky but valid under scrutiny ... Jojo Rabbit isn’t perfect; sometimes it strains to reconcile Waititi’s more relaxed beats (“Let everything happen to you,” is a line from poet Rainer Maria Rilke that gets big play) with his visual fussiness. But he’s legitimately breaking new ground. It will find an audience that gets it.

The central idea here is as durable and effective as a well-told fireside ghost story, but in the cold light of day, the film fades.

Dropping on top of the heap is Lucky McKee's barely competent domestic thriller, bound to make you groan more than think.

You do sense, though, that the people behind MIB3 (mainly veteran producer Walter F. Parkes and script doctor David Koepp) were smart enough to let the audience grow up a bit, enough to get the Andy Warhol jokes and one brilliantly weird creation, a delicate alien who can see every outcome at once.

What made Snowden so compelling in the excellent 2014 documentary Citizenfour reduces him, in the context of an Oliver Stone thriller, to a blur. Even Hackers was more exciting.

It takes a long time for Brothers to become the movie it wants to be, and even then, it stumbles.

Jonathan Levine’s night of debauchery and hugs hits a sweet spot of inoffensive offensiveness.

Despite a roster of off-kilter documentarians each directing an episode, Freakonomics only partly delivers the sense of traipsing into uncharted territory.

Turturro, writing and directing in a register light-years from his nebbishy turn in "Barton Fink," has a more sensual NYC indie in mind.

Too much of the movie feels predestined - down to the rainstorm on opening day - and subplots involving budding romance end up forcing what's implicit. Crowe, meanwhile, still can't stop abusing his vinyl collection; the aural wallpapering of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and others will surely please postboomer fans who haven't quite gotten the hang of silence.

This may be terrifying news to Rob Zombie fans, but after years mining the 1970s for gunky shock moments, the musician-turned-filmmaker has emerged as an unusually sensitive director of actors.

A darkly stylish horror film.

Winterbottom's risks are welcome; it may be time, though, to invest more heart instead of head.

As Holocaust-era movies go (Chastain’s maternal saint begins to secretly hide Jews in her cellar), this one is neither too pretty nor too ugly—which might doom it to a particularly banal shade of detachment.

Dazzling on his recently concluded Kroll Show in multiple caricatures, Nick Kroll makes a savvy pivot to a role that allows for similar shades.

Robustly entertaining.

How I Live Now goes to that nuclear nightmare, and Ronan, who can’t hide her smarts even when the role isn’t as good as the one she had in "Atonement," makes a feast of the journey.

Bad Words soars in the bits of riotously offensive chitchat between Guy and a young Indian hopeful (Rohan Chand); it wobbles in plot developments involving the effortlessly starchy Allison Janney as the contest’s “queen bee”; and it splats in the I’m-secretly-hurting conclusion.

Zippy and saturated with soft-core nudity, The Look of Love isn’t hard to watch, especially when statuesque Tamsin Egerton enters the picture as a redheaded dancer who captures Raymond’s heart.

Like a "Raging Bull" that’s been clocked one too many times in the head, Antoine Fuqua’s blood-simple boxing melodrama is so loaded with obviousness, it gets more pained groans from the audience than the guys in the ring.

It's diminishing returns for a horror sequel that grinds the original premise into the ground while shirking on scares.

Too many characters contribute to a dulling of the cross-cultural spark found in the original (and in the better-known A Prophet). Kinnaman doesn’t have as much to play with this time — without his double life, he’s just an unsmooth criminal.

The doc dutifully allows for these varying viewpoints, but in a mode that’s not especially captivating, despite a guitar score by Brokeback Mountain’s Gustavo Santaolalla.

The pieces here are wonderful, even if the documentary fails to make any kind of overall analytical point.

If the documentary lacks anything, it's a firmer grasp of Springfield's own transformation, from "kind of a dick" (per ex–MTV jock Mark Goodman) during his heyday to a giving, appreciative showman. Call it humility, shaded with weird, two-way neediness. Jesse's girl may have dodged a bullet.

With this depressingly bland sequel (scripted by snark specialist Justin Theroux), he’s (Robert Downey Jr.) stranded in lightweight arrogance.

It plays like a conventional melodrama with better-than-average production values.

What might have been a long walk off a short pier becomes a valid, vital rethinking of a crime classic.

It’s pleasantly perverse, but somehow never quite gels. Still, it’s a fascinating keyhole into a central Hitchcockian idea, the notion that the weirdest behavior comes not from criminals, but our friends and neighbors.

Sometimes Guest’s films stray into snobbery against flyover country, but Mascots mostly avoids that. It hides its toxic warfare under a furry guise.

Bound to surprise absolutely no one, Donald Trump comes off like a shameless boor in this slack, hiss-jerking documentary about his efforts to build a luxurious golf resort on hundreds of pristine acres of the Scottish coast.

Persuasive sci-fi tech talk, soulful romance and an earnest stab at metaphysics combine in director Mike Cahill's polished second feature.

When Phillips’s regular ace Bradley Cooper shows up—as a scowling war profiteer—it just feels like stunt casting and a missed opportunity for levity.

The Equalizer is a stone-dumb movie.

The plot’s a bit complex for what amounts to a lot of running around — the movie can’t help but evoke the Bourne series along with a high-gloss hint of Skyfall, not wholly unpleasantly.

This is the ultimate sin of the film, generically helmed by lad-auteur Guy Ritchie: Logic seems to be thrown out the window in order to make room for clashes on a partially completed Tower Bridge. It’s way too elementary.

The most heart-wrenching thing about the film is watching Fanning’s transformation from idealist to wreck, the father’s free-thinking daughter turned into the mother’s double in the space of a dinner argument. It’s not quite enough for a film, but it is for one magnificent scene.

The 33 makes shameless lunges at religious imagery via ghostly auras and this-is-my-flesh apportioning of daily rations. It feels tacky, and only late in the game does Riggen find the script’s most interesting idea, about unwanted celebrity. Miner story, major fail.

A fine sense of yuppie suffocation—Spin-class listlessness and workaholic disconnection—sets up this indie as a potential suburban satire.

Occasionally, the movie italicizes its points with heavy musical drones, but its tone is remarkably even and concentrated: It makes sense that Jolie excels at stewarding the scenes she usually tears apart onscreen: two people struggling in an emotional death grip, the camera up close.

The 3-D effects, so promising on paper, don't really add much-and, worse, there's a overreliance on slow-motion, which kills the fun.

It's Goldthwait's first misstep, a serious one. He's simply not the filmmaker to mount a fierce takedown of Kardashian culture, thorough though his script's rage is.

Race is the most timid, lackadaisical movie that could have been made out of potentially classic material.

In the film’s second half, the two characters have roughly swapped social positions — Mindy is about to get married — but their sexual attraction (never fully expressed) remains a palpable thing. Try this one.

It makes you laugh in fits and starts, but more often it feels toothless and exhausted, the kind of project that exists to give Ray Liotta work.

Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie's special effects are seamless and far more cleanly cut than any of Michael Bay's hash. But the element that lingers longest is a subtle strand - also woven into last week's "Take Shelter" - of recessionary anxiety.

Unknown is probably the movie "The Tourist" wanted to be, if it had a pulse. Its sheer momentum makes Neeson and Kruger more attractive than even Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

What was Clint thinking? (Or Martin Scorsese, when he made "Shutter Island," for that matter.)

If you go into Maleficent expecting Jolie to be the badass of Sleeping Beauty, you’re going to get burned.

The metafriction between these classic dupes and today's idiots chafes uneasily.