Keith Uhlich

Only Gaby Hoffmann makes a lasting impression, as the thick-skinned pariah of the bunch. Somehow she’s able to give the ring of truth to even the hoariest of Hennelly and cowriter Sarah Adina Smith’s conceits (notably a rally-the-troops speech cribbed from founding father George Washington). The rest makes you long for Armageddon.

You’re thankful when Ayer stops trying to artistically tart up this Peckinpah-lite tale of vengeance and just lets his leading man do what he does best: blow the bad guys away.

Darren Aronofsky’s big-ticket retelling of the biblical legend of Noah (Russell Crowe, so damn serious) is a wildly stupid, yet still train-wreck-fascinating piece of work.

Cheap Thrills is little more than low-budget torture porn for the doobie-addled dudebro contingent.

Maier’s images are truly stunning—vivid documents of the working class that are off-the-cuff yet rigorously composed, always capturing that enigmatic bit of her subject’s soul that leaves you in spine-tingled awe.

The brotherly-love epiphany to which the film builds does effectively pluck the heartstrings, but there’s a lingering sense that we’re being had.

Family members fight and reconcile over delicious-looking regional cuisine, new romantic possibilities present themselves, and Deneuve swans through all the heartstring-plucking silliness like the ethereal superstar she is. There are worse things in life.

The film is made up of plundered parts from the "Oceans" series and "The Usual Suspects," and—like several of the forged tomes that figure in the plot — it’s a pale imitation.

Anyone who has ever loved a television show can see that Thomas and his crew are working overtime to give VM aficionados everything they want.

Melodrama often risks the ridiculous to achieve the sublime, and though this unabashedly earnest tearjerker doesn’t completely transcend its narrative absurdities, it’s enough of a distinctively odd duck to keep you engaged.

This is hardly a symphony of terror, but it’s still a solidly composed exercise in suspense.

Would that the climax lived up to the tension-filled first two thirds. Let’s just say that Non-Stop reaches for some pointed post-9/11 political commentary that almost entirely exceeds its grasp. Total brainlessness, in this case, would have been a virtue.

May’s biggest get, however, is Ciavarella himself—a man forever rationalizing his shady actions, who emerges as a more complexly tragic figure than you’d think possible.

This is a life lived, perhaps not always well, but certainly to the fullest.

A complex final scene — in which everyone finally lets the tears flow — only deepens the sense that well-meaning mother love can be as poisonous as it is nourishing.

Imagine "His Girl Friday" crossed with "Armageddon" and you’ll get a sense of the unfortunate disconnect that prevents an enjoyable light entertainment from achieving rom-com nirvana.

The story beats are as familiar as they come, and there are a few halfhearted stabs at redeeming Roberts’s clueless character when it would have been better to push her feeble-mindedness to Anna Faris–esque extremes.

Del Toro and Amalric’s concentrated performances — the former resigned and shell-shocked, the latter agitated and servile — have an anguished grandeur.

Clooney occasionally shows a surer hand: He gets great work from Downton Abbey’s Bonneville — notably in an emotionally charged scene revolving around Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges — and has a fine monologue himself, in which Stokes dresses down a high-ranking German commander (a moving encapsulation of the American spirit at its best).

Probably best to dissuade the so-bad-it’s-good crowd: There’s nothing here to laugh at with the communal glee of a "Rocky Horror" or "The Room"; only a spectacularly bad composite shot of a fire-fighting plane induces any real giggles.

There’s bleakness in the beauty: What begins as a personal coming-of-age story ends as a tragic tale of a community’s stunted adolescence.

Charlie Victor Romeo would probably work best as a training tool for commercial airline pilots (the play, interestingly, has already been used in this fashion by the Pentagon). In a movie theater for a paying crowd, it’s little more than minimalist snuff.

The Aatsinki siblings never rise past a kind of rotely anonymous masculinity, and overall the film tends to lull rather than engage the senses.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

The movie is never less than involving, but rarely amounts to more than a third-generation grindhouse knockoff.

The real beauty of Maidentrip is how it downplays the go-for-glory aspect of the tale (this adolescent mariner’s aim is to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world) to focus on more earthly matters like the isolation and loneliness of the voyage or the lingering effects of the divorce that irrevocably shaped Dekker’s life.

Quentin Tarantino showcased her bubbly personality (and ass-kicking dexterity) in 2007’s terrific gearhead horror movie, "Death Proof." Now, seasoned stuntwoman Zoë Bell gets a vehicle all her own—a disposable battle royal no-budgeter that’s immensely elevated by her presence.

As the screws turn, and the double crosses begin, the film sinks under the weight of its own ridiculousness. (The ever-reliable Cranston’s thick Euro-villain accent actually turns out to be one of the least ludicrous elements.)