Kevin Jagernauth

It seems doubtful that Ballad of Small Player will serve as a third straight return to the Academy Awards for Berger. However, it does firmly establish the filmmaker as perhaps the finest purveyor of reliably high gloss pulp. But even as far as low stakes bets go, the film only offers a very modest payout.

There’s not a single moment in the film that is palpably authentic or genuinely romantic, but the ensemble nonetheless puts their pluckiest foot forward.

The performances solidly do the job of moving things along, but as game, as they are, Belgau’s screenplay offers the actors few options to work around its creaky dialogue.

A thriller of divided ambitions, that earnestly wants to Say Something Important about the mistreatment of combat veterans by the very government that sends them to war, while also flirting with the opportunity for franchise potential, resulting in a film distinctly cleaved in two, unsatisfying halves.

Utilizing non-professional actors, and blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Stop-Zemlia is a sympathetic portrait of the tidal forces of teenagehood. Yet, despite the film’s quiet sprawl and yearning ambition, Gornostai’s painstakingly observant eye never uncovers fresh insight into the thrumming heart of that transformative moment.

There’s a more rewarding film in here had The Boys From County Hell pushed the humor a bit further, and pitched the scares a touch higher.

Though blessed with a strong lead performance by Pettersen, “Disco” is quick to knock the empty spectacle that undoubtedly accounts for significant portions of contemporary Christianity without entertaining the notion that, for some, faith does hold real value in their lives. It’s not particularly challenging to make a punching bag out of any organized religion, but it takes a far more clever piece of filmmaking to acknowledge its shortcomings and benefits while still maintaining a critical tone. Unfortunately, Disco isn’t that picture.

Yes, God, Yes is too comfortable with itself, too certain in its moral message, while leading Alice through a narrative that is never less than sure. It’s sex comedy as gospel, preaching a placid Sunday afternoon sermon to a congregation of the converted.

For a film that literally isolates its characters from the rest of the world to confront each other head-on, the drama plays more conventional than challenging.

The young couple exists in a bubble of love that has an air of reality sucked right out of it.

Beast takes a storytelling gamble, presenting itself as a psychological whodunit, before pivoting toward a more genre oriented plot. The risk doesn’t quite pay off, undercutting its thematic potential for thrills that aren’t quite that effective.

Marked with a conveyer belt quality, Kodachrome is every indie dramedy you’ve seen before, just like more of you’ll see after, and unlikely to create a cherished memory that you’ll want to revisit.

Chappaquiddick hardly lands with the power of an exposé, and doesn’t bite hard enough to spur a reconsideration of the Kennedys. The film revives a chapter in Kennedy history, but what it means nearly forty years later is never quite clear.

The greatest benefit of the shock release of The Cloverfield Paradox is that going in cold makes the most out of the film’s bonkers turns.

By time Justice League gets to the finish line and credits — stick around, there is an abysmal mid-credits scene, and a decent enough post-credits scene — exhaustion has long set in.

Professor Marston And The Wonder Women tackles one of the most curious chapters of comic book history with an overly classy sheen.

Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House couldn’t be more timely, yet those parallels never quite resonate.

Silveira sets herself up for a balance between realism and aesthetics that she can’t quite navigate.

If nothing else, Reybaud’s debut flaunts his knack for casting, particularly with the lead performance by Pascal Cervo.

For all the strong performances and able filmmaking, My Cousin Rachel never quite coheres.

A Cure For Wellness is an exercise in watching a film continually stifle itself at its most compelling moments.

Directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel aka The Mo Brothers, with a script by the former, what they lack in original or even compelling drama in Headshot, they make up for with the film’s multiple action scenes.

Benyamina displays an empathetic and insightful view of young women, and the challenges of growing up, even if the screenplay doesn’t always follow through. But what Divines absolutely gets right is the deep longing and hunger young people have to better their circumstances, and the desperate lengths they’ll go to reach those goals.

Magnus is gifted with a tremendous opportunity and mostly squanders it, creating a profile that certainly admires Carlsen, but does little to uncover the methodology or magic behind the dazzling display he demonstrates on the board.

In Buster’s Mal Heart, many of the intriguing thematic ideas in the first half of the picture, are left adrift in favor of trying to keep the audience on its toes.

Keeping things on the right side of watchable are the performances, none of which are particularly revelatory, but all of them serving the territory their role in the story requires. Blunt and Bennett both rise above the pack, but even so, the screenplay doesn’t give them dimension until almost too late.

While Lion isn’t the kind of drama that demands risky storytelling, it is one that has within it a whole world of emotional topography that is disappointingly scrolled over instead of mapped out.

As The Gods Will is a minor film from a major talent, but few middle of the road efforts from directors manage to retain the kind of wholly original sensibility seen here, and have as much fun as Miike is while doing it.

The film is a mostly workmanlike biopic that unfortunately can never match the energy of the subject it’s trying to capture.

Any time the duo build up a significant amount of energy, the messy mechanics of the story come barreling in, shifting the narrative attention to the tedious developments involving encryption keys, which is nothing more than a Macguffin to begin with.

A thriller so turgid that its setting in logging country starts to feel like heavy irony: Lord, does it lumber.

According to Len, rock ‘n roll is "blood, bourbon, and napalm," and it’s exactly those elements that the film needs, but doesn’t provide.

While The Ones Below doesn’t make it over the finish line, Farr shows good instincts, and has an ease for creating tension without overt manipulation, while keeping everything engaging enough that you’re willing to overlook questions that nag after the credits roll.

Director Anne Fontaine’s film is based on actual events and grapples with thorny questions that plague even the most zealous during times of crisis. It’s a pity, then, that this picture finds Fontaine compelled to find a resolution in a situation that seldom yields easy answers.

It’s a film that desperately wants to upend the tropes of the comic book movie, but perhaps more shocking than anything that comes out of the mouth of its often obnoxious titular hero, is how blandly the picture sticks to the origin story playbook.

Fitfully entertaining, and even more rarely actually funny, Daddy's Home, tellingly, only really comes alive in the very last portion of the third act.

The film’s haphazard construction is made all the more frustrating because somewhere in this material is a much more resonant picture.

Vanderbilt chooses to present the tale with a lighter comic touch in the early stages, and it’s a tone the picture can’t overcome in its final third.

screenwriter Amy Jump and director Ben Wheatley are less concerned with the message than with the madness, and their resulting picture is heavier on style than substance.

That The Dressmaker remains watchable in any sense is thanks in large part to a cast who give the material that’s way beneath them far better treatment than it deserves.

Ultimately, Dellal’s film is never as brave or courageous as Ray, and in spending more time on Maggie than her son, misses the opportunity to jump from informational to insightful.

Portman wants to articulate something beyond the ordinary, and while she hasn’t found it in this picture, perhaps there are lessons here to be learned before she mounts her next effort.

The engaging opening third of Cooties is enough to make the rest of the 96-minute film a mildly amusing diversion, but as the minutes roll by, you'll wish the brains of the film had remained intact.

Both a disappointment and a missed opportunity.

Gemma Bovery attempts to bring new heat to an old story, but mostly winds up cooling on the sill.

Maggie is not your standard zombie movie, and while it tantalizingly puts action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger into the lead role, the film is actually low on setpieces, and instead is a ponderous, sombre take on the genre that may leave those looking for a traditional horror flick disappointed.

For a movie that rides on a well-executed, modest and at times playful B-movie engine, the film stumbles in its final third, with goofy plotting... and a turn from the subdued to the hysterical.

The idea of turning a true crime story into a intellectual cinematic exercise is novel, and could be witty and sharp, but 'Angel' never comes across that way.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken never conveys how a bunch of working stiffs transformed themselves into a coiled — if scrappy and ragtag — criminal operation.

Love, Rosie doesn't aspire to be anything more than a digestible rom-com trifle. It's a sweet movie about sweet people who are always sweet to each other and it's enough to make one sick on the saccharine.

Trying to find a middle ground between an action packed Statham vehicle, a '70s style mood piece, and a '90s era, character-actor packed crime tale, Wild Card is not surprisingly an unsuccessful marriage of those ill-fitting genres.

For filmmakers Angus Macqueen and Guillermo Galdos, they've undoubtedly chosen a great subject for a compelling documentary. Unfortunately, they squander the opportunity with Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty, and it's due to the common problem of contemporary documentaries, where the directors get so far in the way of their own story, that any context or objectivity is lost.

Mahony and Sampson certainly know how to lay out a crime/thriller/comedy structurally, but unfortunately, they mishandle the tone and momentum this sort of movie needs to work.

There is a better, more contemplative movie to be made with this material, but with Brand and the filmmakers opting for cheap thrills, it leaves the movie, like the passengers on the plane, stuck on the tarmac.

It's not the most complex WWII movie you'll see, but there's no denying the blunt intensity of Fury, and even if it doesn't sustain, Ayer commits to staring straight into hellish eye of war and bringing audiences along to witness every gruesome detail.

Competently directed, and delivered with the expected emotional beats, Still Alice achieves its modest goals, but one wishes it had a grander vision.

It's a shame Reitman goes down such a dull and tired road with his movie, because the cast give some really nice turns.

Though LaGravenese's faithfulness to the songbook is perhaps admirable, the results don't quite work cinematically.

The Keeping Room attempts a blend of sexual curiosity, home invasion horror and elegiac drama, that doesn't quite work, but whose ambitions are nonetheless compelling.

Though Horovitz's directing is workmanlike solid, and while the movie has a certain charm that makes it easy to walk in the door, it gives you little reason to stay.

The Judge has the curious ability of straining too hard while managing to say nothing dramatically.

A minor effort at best, and disappointingly lacking a sense of energy or intent, Me And You is Bertolucci exercising his filmmaking muscles, but not flexing them.

In Bana and Ramirez, who share a palpable bro-mantic, odd-couple quality, the film finds its most charismatic element... but shoves it aside to deliver a movie that will dully meet the barest of expectations instead of trying to exceed them.

The film is an almost overly thorough look at every single step along the way in the battle to bring Prop 8 down. And while that's admirable, and gay rights is certainly a fight that needs to be documented, the minutely detailed The Case Against 8 has the curious effect of dampening the drama through its approach.

For those who didn't know how flawed and manipulated the act of casting a ballot has become, Citizen Koch is a decent enough primer, but for everyone else long past the tipping point, this is just more evidence for a problem that currently has no solution.

Inert from the start, and presented with little emotional depth or weight, Small Time gets the car started but doesn't go anywhere interesting.

There is enough of a simple charm to A Birder's Guide To Everything that there are worse things you could do with your hour and a half. The lead teens in particular give the material a realness that may not have been there on the page, and the filmmakers know enough not push the quaint story beyond the safe parameters it operates in.

Working off what appears to be a pretty decent script by Mark Poirier, who does a good job of juggling quite a few story threads and giving each enough attention and depth, Johnson's rigorous and formal approach doesn't allow for any sparks, let alone fireworks.

There is something potentially special in the elements of The Returned, with its allusions to class and social structures, and stigmas held around people with certain afflictions. But it merely nods toward them with no commentary or depth.

Someone Marry Barry is a reasonably entertaining argument that good performers can enliven weak material.

The narrative may hit all the markers, but its transparent attempts to wring emotion fail to move.

The Book Thief covers a large span of time, but the film's episodic nature, often moving from one incident to the next with little time to pause or reflect, often obscures that fact and hinders an evocation of the cumulative effect the war has on the psyche of not just the Hubermanns, but their neighbors, too.

Yes, it's uneven, more jokes miss than hit, and it winds up taking easy dramatic shortcuts from the more interesting avenues that the script presents, but it's thanks to the lead quartet that the comedy is as engaging at it is.

Yet despite recent solid entries like "Margin Call" and "Too Big Too Fail," we're yet to see the first great contemporary movie about the country, and world's, economic woes, and unfortunately Costa-Gavras' Le Capital doesn't remedy that situation.

Haphazard and on the edge of half-hearted, the documentary always feels like a sketch rather than a finished design.

Runner Runner is content to stay high gloss, with no filler.

A lack of courage on behalf of the filmmakers to take any position renders the film narratively limp.

Fading Gigolo is mostly an inoffensive trifle, slightly undone by its lack of focus and mishmash of genres that don't quite come together. But it's breezily told and acted, with some decent laughs and unlike many comedies these days, it actually cares and respects the characters and the consequences of what they go through.

Since the music doesn't connect like it should, everything else that is underpinned in the story by these songs also doesn't come together with the weight or power Carney surely intended.

August: Osage County is a film of big, wild gestures, plate smashing, screaming and tears, but not nuance, and it all has the effect of leaving one deadened, not moved.

We're The Millers isn't really a bad movie, so much as its inoffensively and instantly forgettable.

Lethargic and not particularly invigorating or fresh, you can skip Wasteland and wait for the next Brit crime flick that will be following before long.

By the time the origin movie stuff is wrapped up and the audience finally gets to see The Lone Ranger and Tonto on their first of their legendary deeds, it's far too late in the movie, particularly if your patience has already been drained by the simple yet over-elaborately staged plot, that struggles to be compelling.

Never quite as deep or probing as it thinks it is, Thanks For Sharing is an unsatisfying tease.

Comparatively simplistic and somewhat lazy, Unfinished Song presents one-dimensional characters in a thoroughly predictable story that aspires to be little more than easily digestible.

Your mileage with the movie will depend on how much you like these guys to begin with, because even if you're a fan, the one joke premise has a hard time sustaining a full length movie.

Grigris is the unusual movie that takes a lead's obvious talents, and curiously backgrounds them, hoping for their charisma to carry over to more traditional cinematic purposes.

Ozon wants to have it both ways with Young & Beautiful, using a young woman's risk-filled sexual awakening as an illustration of coming-of-age, while also demanding a realism from a situation that he keeps far from being rationalized and justified.

The problem is that the movie becomes more focused on diagnosis than character, and so what eventually unfolds is a meandering picture that only too late in the game leans toward highlighting any kind of thematic undercurrent while introducing romantic interests for the leads that do little but pad out an already too long running time.

As I Lay Dying is another Franco lark that is more of an experiment with form than a fully realized movie. One almost gets the sense that Franco is working out ideas with As I Lay Dying, with the goal of creating a cohesive film as a secondary ambition to simply capturing the feel of Faulkner's prose.

It's the picture's lack of focus that eventually diminishes whatever little The Bling Ring has to say.

Though given two committed turns by a tremendously sexy and vicious Arterton and a solid-as-always Ronan, Byzantium often feels as gray and lifeless as the corpses in the film.

No matter how it shakes out, 'Mad Man' will never be more than an interesting curio that provides a basic overview of why Stern matters. But for the rest of us, the images themselves will be the greatest evidence on their own of Stern's innovation in photography, fashion and advertising.

There is no doubt that Greetings From Tim Buckley is respectful, and thanks to Badgley and Rosenfield, does justice to both singers. But the film never quite connects father and son as each sharing the common bond of extraordinary talent or even similar personal woes.

While it's great to look at, Reality is an empty shell. A feature length examination on the artifice of reality programming, Garrone's film itself is superficial and lacking the same depth of artistry and ideas he finds absent on TV.

The movie is never without forward momentum, it's just too bad when just when it's ready to go to interesting places, we jump back to Bonner and Aya's pedestrian romance.

It's enjoyable and toe-tapping for what it is, but it's also extremely lightweight stuff.

A valiant attempt to build on the magic of “The Wizard Of Oz,” and while it certainly doesn’t diminish the standing of that movie, Sam Raimi’s film provides proof that the more we know about the mysteries of our favorite stories, the less interesting they become.