Keith Uhlich

More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.

The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.

The late Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play isn’t opened up so much as clinically dissected by the film, with every character an enfeebled pawn in situations they’re at a loss to resolve.

There are plenty of real-life anecdotes that Scott Cooper draws from Warren Zane’s 2023 book Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, but they’re filtered through the hoariest of biopic clichés.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.

Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.

In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.

The film is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed.

Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.

The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.

The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.

For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.

That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.

The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.

The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.

It’s nonetheless the very slipperiness of Sakurai’s passion — to humbly become the god he worships — that continually compels.

[Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.

For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?

The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.

Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes.

Getting old, as Jackie and Don would have it, is part of their overall project. More than once they talk about the impermanence of the materials they use. One day, their art will cease to be, as will they. That Zen pronouncement doesn’t make the day-in/day-out drudgery of aging any easier.

This Bond’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity.

What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs.

Godzilla and Kong’s brawls have the ennui-inducing feel of a child arbitrarily smashing action figures together.

Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.

Director Nick Rowland couldn't ask for a more magnetically tormented character to anchor his low-key-to-a-fault feature debut.

[A] very funny, very moving documentary.

Heimat certainly has the feel of a summative work

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

At one point, Tsemel describes herself as a member of an occupying force and defines her mission in life as to somehow rectify the resultant power imbalance. The only way to get there, as the film's pointed final image suggests, is to keep on trudging.

Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.

In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.

The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it’s unfortunate that John Magaro and Orion Lee's characters ultimately feel outside it all.

Noah Hawley treats his protagonist’s story as a somber tragedy that at times stoops to trashiness.

Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman‘s text and its technique.

This is a tumultuous muse story in which the artist and his inspiration just happen to be blood relations.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

Olive paints a portrait of righteous rage and determination.

The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.

Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.

Steven Soderbergh takes a macro approach to the scandal, though the results, with rare exception, are vexingly micro.

The images, and the actions within them, lack the acerbic edge that would really drive the knife in.

The film is one that might have been dreamed up by one of the cynical douche bros from the Hangover during a blacked-out stupor.

Waititi is incapable of dealing with the twin horrors of oppression and indoctrination beyond cheap-seats sentimentality and joke-making.

It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.

The blurring of the lines between fiction and fact still mostly feels like a crutch or an affectation. It's as if Cordero and Croda are trying to goose the drama rather than unearth it, never entirely trusting that Felipe's life is interesting enough as is.

Schimberg confidently blurs the lines between fantasy and reality (more than once a scene that appears to be real is actually fiction and vice versa), though never to the point that it detracts from the people onscreen.

End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy.

All of these beasties are "scary." Though they'd be much more so if they felt less like franchisable IP and more like fervent expressions of the ills of the eras on which the film aims to comment.

The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams, adjusting the tone, the approach, the narrative twists and the emotional intensity on the fly.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

Fiske and Hallin show, over the course of their very affecting movie, how this naive analogy both complements and conflicts with the ups-and-downs of Gemma's reality.

The filmmaker seems to have been granted unprecedented access to both Manning and to the people around her, and he uses this natural, unforced intimacy to present a fragmented portrait of a person attempting to readapt to a society in which they never particularly learned how to fit.

Since the lead character is effectively a mystery man, some lack of grounding is appropriate. Unfortunately, the impressionism — the improvisation, you might say, of this particular life (mirroring, one supposes, Bolden's approach to music) — is so dominant that it finally proves a crutch.

Like Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy or Granik's Leave No Trace, this low-key drama focuses on a regional American woman trying to sustain herself through rough economic and emotional times. It's derivative of both films, but, for a little while at least, not disagreeably so.

There's a shakiness in how Hormann utilizes the fact that Aynur's murder is a foregone conclusion. It's as if the director is delaying gut-wrenching emotion as opposed to letting it emerge organically from the stylistic severity.

Nearly eight years on from the signing of all the brand extension contracts, here is the primarily pop-star-voiced animated musical UglyDolls, an imbecilic eyesore that could lay claim to being one of the worst movies ever made if it was worth such hyperbole.

Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.

None of it adds up to much beyond painting the band, despite their often repellently bad behavior, in a flattering light.

Two Plains & a Fancy is a cosmic joke forged on a Kickstarter budget. To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, it made me laugh.

The film improves upon reflection, raising, as it does, some knotty questions about originality in art and in life, as well as provocatively positing that even a copy of a copy of a copy has the potential to move hearts and minds.

It’s a comedy and a tragedy, though the people involved aren’t necessarily on rigid opposite sides. Better to say that everyone has some level of fluidity, not just in terms of personal belief, though they’ll speak their dogmatic minds if the occasion demands it.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

Polar is pure trash, but the generousness — and, in the final stretch, the poignancy — with which Mikkelsen approaches even the most lurid of the film's conceits at least pushes it toward the top of the garbage heap.

There's barely a scene in IO that's performed with pulse or verve. It's Sad-Face Emoji Sci-Fi, with po-faced references to Greek mythology, Chopin and T.S. Eliot, among others, and empirical techno-jargon spoken at a Valley Girl level of credibility.

M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.

The jaw is meant to and does often drop, and not just because of McFarland. Two words: Ja Rule.

All highs eventually fade, and The Last Laugh quickly returns to its noxious mix of sweet and sour.

If there are any dadaist cinephiles out there, perhaps they can reclaim Second Act as a multilayered masterpiece of illogic. Certainly the film seems destined to survive all future nuclear winters, enduring as a time capsule of humanity at its most pitiably pedestrian.

The story's knotty aspects reverberate under its sentimental-cum-inspirational surface. In the guise of a glossy entertainment, Welcome to Marwen gets at some unnervingly irresolvable truths about humanity.

The filmmakers treat their material sternly and humorlessly, as if there's some great moral lesson to be imparted from Erin's inexhaustible blotto jerkiness.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

This is derivative if well-executed product, except when it comes to the relationship at the film’s center.

Good as Lucas Hedges is at acting the tortured teen, Jared is finally too much of a cipher for his story to really hit with the force that it should.

It should surprise no one that, as Hell Fest comes to a close, Evil Hoodie Man pulls a Michael Myers disappearing act. This leads to a narrative twist so ridiculous that all non-syringe-pierced oculi will roll.

David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.

The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.

Felix Van Groeningen commendably sustains the story's profound sense of irresolution: abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse—an endless cycle of teeth-gritted optimism at best, soul-deadening dashed hopes at worst.

The mystery surrounding the Slones and their missing child is much less interesting than Core's burgeoning friendship with the local sheriff, Donald Marium (James Badge Dale), who assists with the investigation.

Sutton is aiming to make a grand statement about America's downtrodden, and he never lets you forget it.

It's a competent, by-the-numbers action melodrama.

No one makes movies like Peter Strickland.

The filmmaker's expressively cockeyed impulses soon take over (he's ably assisted by the terrific cinematographer Seamus McGarvey), and the resulting craziness is quite delightful to behold in the moment and to reflect on after.

For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal.

Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.

This is in many ways a white-knuckle brand extension for Honnold above all else. Still, the film frequently treads into knotty territory.

Gleeson plays the role with the kind of full-bore commitment (every supercilious gesture precise and intelligently thought through) that makes you wish the movie better complemented his efforts.

At its strongest, the film feels like kin to Kirsten Johnson’s great Cameraperson (2016), a free-associative nonfiction memoir comprised mostly of B-roll and personal footage. Though the subject here isn’t Ross himself (despite a few offscreen aural appearances) but an entire community that, in both micro- and macrocosmic senses, has remained historically unacknowledged and unseen.

Stephen Maing's documentary about the NYPD's illegal policing quotas and other discriminatory practices gets the blood boiling.

Union certainly dedicates herself to all the huffing, running, jumping and emoting, though her efforts never counter Breaking In’s aura of trashiness and disposability.

Alex Strangelove is much more affecting whenever Johnson steps out of genre comfort zones.

Tennant is awful, by which I mean wonderful, by which I mean truly terrible, yet in a legitimately magnificent way…I think. This is a you-can’t-kill-THAT-performance! par excellence, beginning at peak nutball and staying breathlessly atop the trash heap.

This is, in abstract, a bold and brilliant performance, an act of possession, really, and Smith never personally steps wrong in the film’s 96 minutes. But his work, sadly, is continuously undermined by everything surrounding him, beginning with a script, written by Timoner and Mikko Alanne, that frustratingly sticks to the then-this-happened conventions of a standard biopic.

Sarah’s circumstances are so ridiculously dire that there’s little left to do but laugh at them.

Superficiality reigns, but then a truly affecting scene will pop up.

Pascal and Thatcher are an outwardly compelling team, though they’re playing constructs instead of characters, hollow vehicles racing through this ragged future as opposed to convincingly long-term inhabitants of it.

Jinn consistently lets down its premise and performers with a by-the-numbers-at-best screenplay that triple-underlines all of its forward-thinking themes.

Whatever pathos is generated comes from Reynolds' commitment to all the self-exploitation. His inimitable charm is still there beneath all the corporeal decrepitude on which Rifkin and company shamelessly linger.

Olin never wavers in her commitment. She's often extraordinary in individual moments.

Earnest to a fault and soft-edged in its approach to faith (God is more in the margins here than he is a central, narrative-driving presence), yet direct and moving in some scene-by-scene specifics because of their basis in reality.

One thing's for certain: Not even Charles Darwin could fully figure this monkey out.

Sandler's drool-accompanied ogling of the female form is now near Woody Allen levels of ick.

By the end, you'll feel like you've seen it all before. But for a good while, Retake...seems like it's carving out some distinctive new territory in the well-trod world of queer cinema.

In the moment, the film's simplistic spirit is intoxicating. But take my word for it — the real-world hangover that follows is fierce.

By now, it's clear that every Adam Sandler movie is dada of the high-concept, low-hanging-fruit variety, in which the Happy Madison stock company uses filmmaking (loosely termed) as an excuse to take an extended tropical vacation.

It's never fun watching a comedian's shrewdness ossify into shtick. Yet whatever incisiveness Ricky Gervais once had (and he had plenty, if The Office and Extras are any indication) is barely evident in the new Netflix-released satire Special Correspondents

A wrongheaded, utterly incompetent, and nearly laugh-free satire.

The Young Messiah is just, like, barely competent enough that the faith-based target audience won't feel entirely cheated.

Lumbering, lifeless, and—strange thing to say about a cadaver—almost entirely charmless. Almost entirely because both Lily James, as headstrong heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Sam Riley, as her brooding suitor Mr. Darcy, make for a delightful onscreen pair.

No one emerges especially worse for wear because the entire production is wholly apathetic to everything from a compelling story to sharp comic timing.

One thing’s certain: This is no swoony love story. It intoxicates all the same.

It really packs a punch (bet you saw that one coming).

The popular view of art is that it belongs to the masses. Wiseman casts a more skeptical eye, questioning such egalitarianism with cold, hard historical context. Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that these works live on far beyond their original purpose, even if, as the film’s bold, brilliant climax suggests, they may eventually play to an audience of none.

Diplomacy’s origins as a play (written by Cyril Gely and starring the same actors) are always evident. Despite Schlöndorff’s attempts to give the movie some pop through widescreen lensing and noirish lighting, it’s a visually staid affair—very “filmed theater.” Fortunately, both Arestrup and Dussolier are captivating presences.

What really makes Rudderless a full-blown affront is a late-breaking narrative revelation (no spoilers here) that’s meant to add resonant emotional depth, but instead comes off as jaw-droppingly repugnant. That’s appropriate, though, for a movie with no sense of direction.

Ultimately, this feels like a hagiographic official portrait that takes the sting out of the proverbial bee.

The early scenes of Gabe Ibáñez’s impressively mounted but uneven thriller do some terrific dystopian world-building.

The movie’s admirable fleetness, however, doesn’t mitigate some of its narrative errors — Alexander’s opening voiceover suggests his family is totally oblivious to his role in their misery, which is disproved by a later scene — nor does it counteract an overall sense of slightness that prevents this from being a family-film classic.

Good God almighty: Not since Edward D. Wood Jr. unleashed a flotilla of paper-plate UFOs on beautiful downtown Burbank has there been a movie as stem-to-stern inept as this adaptation of the bestselling Christian novel series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Apart from the devastating material itself, some of Lapa’s aesthetic choices are extremely off-putting.

For all its surface effectiveness, however, The Blue Room never quite makes that intangible leap into greatness. It’s a phenomenally executed exercise that, like its protagonist’s memory, is too wispy for its own good.

For a while it’s a low-key fish-out-of-water comedy (with McDonald’s as one of its many obvious punch lines), then it morphs into a cumbrously sentimental tale of redemption.

There’s no real pleasure in any of the musical performances. And when married to the scenes exploring Hendrix’s tumultuous personal life—particularly his semi-abusive relationship with long-term girlfriend Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell)—you’re left with a monotonously grim portrait that’s more rewarding in theory than execution.

Probably the biggest sin in a movie filled with many is turning Fonda into a nymphomaniacal sight gag who makes Barbarella look like Gloria Steinem.

You can’t help but feel all the palpable joy is eliding some darker realities that would lend the copious musical performances a deeper resonance.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is reduced to a crystalline, though still complicated, essence in Nadav Schirman’s alternately tedious and engrossing documentary.

The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.

The filmmaker’s second feature is an unfortunate sophomore slump, an abrasive and opaque artist-in-crisis story that feels protracted at barely 80 minutes.

Ed Harris is a performer made for Westerns, and he’s perfectly utilized in debuting director Michael Berry’s middling if still very watchable modern-day oater as Roy.

This potent emotional undercurrent goes a long way toward counteracting the movie’s clumsier moments, carrying us aloft to a finale that, in its strange mix of trepidation and tenderness, is truly sublime.

The survey the film provides is bracing, and there are plenty of talking heads to guide us through the kaleidoscope of imagery. Unfortunately, there’s also a public-television vibe to the proceedings that mutes the overall power. It’s essential info presented with little imagination.

It’s another fascinating entry in the director’s ongoing exploration of the sadistic and masochistic facets of human behavior.

In comparison with near-impenetrable Garrel efforts like "Regular Lovers" (2005) and "Frontier of the Dawn" (2008), Jealousy cuts straight to the heart.

By using Laura as an avatar, Marker actually helps us see the visuals and their knotty meanings much more clearly. The more we watch, the more Laura softens, until — in a mind-bending conceit — her very status as a fictional creation is called into question. The effect is ecstatic.

You might actually say the documentary itself is Mohassess’s final canvas, so infused it becomes with his alternately infuriating and infectious personality.

These scenes make you wish the rest of the movie had similar bite, but Gibney tends toward that dutiful doc style that mixes talking heads and archival clips into a flavorless stew—a bland complement to Fela’s zesty on- and offstage presence.

There’s a fine line between modesty and inconsequence, and this low-key, primarily improvised feature from mumblecore staple Joe Swanberg mostly blurs the divide.

Winterbottom’s inability to bring off this lurid stew of sex and violence is one problem; his (mis)direction of Affleck is another.

The funny thing about all these sub-"Matrix" shenanigans is that they’re genuinely meant to stoke thought and reflection. Frankly, though, few movies have left me feeling as shorn of gray matter.

The director’s latest—a lighthearted romance set in 1920s Germany and France—won’t do much to sway proponents or detractors from their own perspectives, though taken at face value, it’s one of Allen’s most charmingly conceived and performed efforts.

The results make your head spin more than they make your spirits soar.

The film adheres closely to a well-reviewed theater production cocreated by and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, both of whom get to riff on their prickly "My Dinner with Andre" rapport.

The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.

They have little feel for the technical side of filmmaking; the imagery is flat and the editing amateurish. Most shots seem held for a beat too long or too short, wreaking havoc with the comic rhythm. Nonetheless, McCarthy and Falcone’s attempts to make Tammy more flesh-and-blood than a figure of fun are often poignant.

Here, though, everyone involved seems above the rom-com conventions they’re satirizing, so anxious to get to each punch line that they let the connective tissue languish. You howl often but quickly forget why.

False moments far outweigh the genuine ones, be it smarmy Dan’s indisputable genius (he’s such a stubble-sporting rebel, he refuses to wear suits) or the bogus anticorporate finale that leaves an especially slick aftertaste.

This is a movie that preaches to its rafters-raising choir.

Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws.

Imagine "Goodfellas" without much in the way of stakes, and you’ll get Clint Eastwood’s pleasingly square and forgettable adaptation of the Tony-feted 2006 jukebox musical.

Like :Carnage,: it’s a bit of a minor lark until a deliciously grotesque finale pushes it into the realm of such kinkily profound Polanski films as: Cul-de-sac: (1966) and "The Tenant" (1976). By that point, you can’t help but submit to the perversity.

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

The main talking point of this empty-headed thriller from Mexican director Amat Escalante is a sure-to-be-notorious instance of penis incineration — a dubious distinction.

Hellion aims to cut deep, striking a tone that melds the hysterical moralism of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) with the coming-of-age melancholy of Mud’s Jeff Nichols (also this film’s executive producer).

Only Jones seems most at home, striking just the right note of low-key malevolence. You’d follow him anywhere — maybe even into a better movie.

Bellocchio counters these flaws with an energetically combative aesthetic (he makes you feel like you’re riding out a sociopolitical tempest, careening between perspectives) and an overarching humanism that gives equal weight to the many feelings stirred up by this hot-button situation.

It goes off the rails early and often. You almost have to give it props for how resolutely batshit it is. Almost.

The script—which Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver adapted from Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel—shifts uneasily between tragedy and comedy.

It’s nice to see this great filmmaker sculpting something that feels genuinely revelatory. That’s not to say that the 3-D Goodbye to Language is always an easy sit.

Once Miller lays all his cards on the table, however, you realize you haven’t been watching people struggling with the very real temptations of unchecked privilege, so much as fumbling blindly in a glib, gloomy satire of American exceptionalism.

Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary—rough-edged in style, yet anchored by pointed and poignant interviews with the man himself — is mostly for those already fascinated by Vidal’s colorful life.

Mostly, though, this Creek has run dry.

You may often find yourself second-guessing the film, questioning how—and if—it will all come together. But by the time of the intense and impassioned climax, a storm of emotion is ensured: a great movie rising before you like a delusion, like a dream.

What keeps you watching is the charisma of the performers: Hamm does an amiable riff on his Don Draper persona (he’s cynical before the big melt), Lake Bell is a delight as his tart-tongued love interest, and Sharma and Mittal are all charm as the cultures-uniting underdogs.

Fortunately Coppola’s sensitivity is always evident, especially in the open-hearted performances she gets from Roberts and Kilmer (whose father, Val, has a funny, pot-addled cameo).

Marvin Kren’s enjoyable if ephemeral horror movie gets by for a while on its dopey premise.

The whole sorry enterprise leaves you feeling, well, shafted.

It’s unfortunate that Stelling and his cast aren’t able to lift the story much above mawkishness.

Fortunately, a few striking sequences break up the tedium.

You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.

Yet Green, as is his wont, too often strains for poetic effect through flowery voiceover and tone-deaf interactions — like those between Joe and his latest short-term girlfriend — that undercut the genuineness.

If Jim Jarmusch’s languorous, laconic style isn’t your bag, his stone-faced vampire comedy won’t make you a believer. Those who’ve already been bitten, however, will swoon like the film’s toothy leads whenever their lips touch neck juice.

All of this is fascinating in the moment, yet the doc never yokes all these threads into anything particularly deep or illuminating. The Galapagos Affair is less social commentary, more gossip.

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.)

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

The basics of the story remain unchanged, but it’s the wanna-be-blockbuster additions that rankle, be it the incoherent direction of first-time feature director Carl Rinsch or the copious CGI beasties who look like rejected "Lord of the Rings" villains.

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

What ran more than three hours onstage now barely cracks two, and the cutting can be felt in the way the often gut-busting bad behavior is privileged over psychological credibility.

It’s almost impossible to describe the narrative specifics of The Past without making the movie seem ridiculously hammy. Indeed, several twists involving Samir, a dry cleaner with plenty of his own troubles, tip a bit into hoary melodramatics.

By the time the beast spreads his wings to full span, soaring skyward toward a vaguely Spielbergian moon, you’re in the kind of breathless awe that so few current cinematic superproductions are able to provide.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

There are a few too many twists on this highway.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

Though Lemmons’s parable-like intentions are clear, almost every beat of Langston’s tale, with its absent father figures and heated gun-pointing melodrama, rings false — hardly a fitting contemporary complement to the Greatest Story Ever Told.

The story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

A Matrix Reloaded–like cliffhanger reminds that this is only the second installment out of four (good lord), but at least the flick leaves us with more than a tinge of interest in whom the odds will favor next.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

Once Pip reaches the big city, Newell starts losing the dramatic focus, piling on incidents and revelations with a bombastic force that makes it seem as if we’re watching a cheap 19th-century telenovela.

To call this a turkey would be an insult to poultry.

In a word: Ugh.

The overall effect is not unlike watching a chef de cuisine experimenting in his off-hours; not everything takes, but you still come away with a pleasingly stimulated palate.

No new ground is broken, and viewers will, not unpleasantly, get everything they expect. It’s apparently morning in America again.

The scenes of the film’s exuberant, frizzy-haired protagonist wandering Naples and revisiting old haunts, however, seem much more unfocused—a ramshackle search for insights into the man’s art and life that rarely come. The instruments are in tune, but the rhythm is off.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.

Exploitative as this may seem in theory, it works beautifully onscreen, mostly because of Binoche’s radiantly complicated humanity.

What we’re left with are a bunch of unseasoned performers and a first-time filmmaker clearly out of his depth (good lord, those green-screen shots!) hocking loogies at Mickey and friends with hit-and-mostly-miss fervidness.

This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.

There’s still enough of merit here (particularly a movingly low-key finale that strikes just the right note of reconciliation and regret) to suggest that Porterfield has the chops to eventually hone his talents to a fine point.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

There’s a sense that all the thematic messiness is intentional, a way for Jia to diagnose the ills of a country whose economic and social fabric is wilting under the effects of rapid modernization.

It’s only when the sentient snacks are front and center that this middling sequel to the 2009 animated hit truly comes alive.

As with many a first feature, Gordon-Levitt’s so-so directorial debut is pumped up with ambition. The early scenes, heavy on caricature, promise to puncture much of the cocky illusions surrounding modern relationships.

This is not a choice made lightly by anyone involved, but the admirable, multilayered toughness of these sequences is unfortunately weakened by the filmmakers’ saccharine touch whenever they explore the doctors’ personal lives.

The uniformly showy performances (Acting with a capital ‘A’) are what do in Prisoners more than anything.

The effort is commendable and the complicated emotions of the piece (for a place and a people) come through loud and clear. To paraphrase the great Ms. Russell, the movie has the power to make you laugh and the power to break your heart in half.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.

Watching this see-in-the-dark muscleman brooding against gorgeous otherworldly vistas, all while crafting pointy homemade weapons and befriending a scene-stealing CGI canine (no joke), is a sci-fi aficionado's delight.

Photographed with an alluring sheen that complements the coldly commercial wheelings and dealings of its subjects, Red Obsession fascinatingly reveals how Old World vintner artistry is being shaken up by New World supply and demand.

If anything distinguishes director Régis Roinsard’s take on well-trod material, it’s his Technicolor-bright widescreen palette (recalling many a late-’50s pillow-talk romance without a hint of snooty irony) and energetically game cast.

You can barely stifle a laugh, and the way Wright and Watts deliver rote, morally searching dialogue with deer-in-the-headlights stoicism (“We’ve crossed a line,” Lil blankly notes) doesn’t help matters.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

Viewers familiar with Daniels’s idiosyncratically vulgar work might be disappointed that there’s little here that compares to Nicole Kidman loosing a yellow stream on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in "The Paperboy" (2012).

Don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial.

Smash & Grab aims to replicate the mesmeric tension of a Michael Mann thriller (the crime-cinema impresario is even explicitly referenced by one of the cops assigned to hunt down the group), though the film is so all over the place stylistically that it often seems like several different movies cut together.

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

The sights are gorgeous—a seamless mix of archival imagery and impressively rendered digital views of our galaxy—and the science is, to layman’s eyes and ears, more than credible.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

As in the first film, the seasoned-pro cast provides the few fleeting pleasures to be found.

Fortunately, Oppenheimer keeps the film focused on the highly complicated Anwar — a charismatic devil if ever there was one — observing as this strange reckoning with the past slowly breaks down his defenses.

What’s past is prescient, and what it all means is beside the point. Let’s just say Bujalski has made a prankishly out-of-time movie about that other AI: mankind.

Moreover, the story doesn’t climax in all’s-well-that-ends-well matrimony, instead building to a beautifully bittersweet moment of self-realization, one with a light-touch profundity that would make the Bard proud.

As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)

Carell and Wiig make a splendid vocal pair — Nick and Nora Charles with ice guns and lipstick Tasers.

It's all too much and not enough—a succession of disparate, can-you-top-this episodes inelegantly piling up like skidding cars on a freeway. And that's not even taking into account the action scenes. Lord, those action scenes: Monotonous, loud and relentless, they're a punishing example of the self-satisfied, digitally augmented ephemera that typifies modern Hollywood moviemaking, and House Bruckheimer in particular.

They (Bullock/McCarthy) deserve a much stronger showcase than this Laurel & Hardy Go Policin’ vehicle.

What played as rousingly dumb fun in "Independence Day" (1996) — all those pie-eyed nationalistic monologues, and U.S. landmarks reduced to rubble — now come off as callously insensitive, even with tongue firmly in cheek.

Jordan’s poetic sensibilities more than make up for any flaws. His uncanny aptitude for conjuring up resonantly metaphorical images — from a pointed fingernail pushing toward a vein to a waterfall turning into a literal river of blood — proves there’s plenty of life left in this undead genre.

It’s high time Pedro had a lark. The buoyant and bawdy I’m So Excited plays like a to-hell-with-it-all riff from this seminal Spanish auteur, an excuse to gather his stock company for a breezy 90-minute party.

The longer the film goes on, the more it seems like a collection of gorgeous images without an overall organizing structure. Our youthful lead’s slow disillusionment with his complicated surroundings ultimately plays less profound than petulant.