Kevin Jagernauth

For all its minor faults of under-developed characters and disjointed scenes, “Honey” is worth seeing not only for the compelling performances from the two leads but for the incredibly effective use of light, reminding us just how much other films take it for granted.

The sincerity and honesty of the stories within, as odd as they are, make The Final Member worth seeking out.

When you plunk down your $12, you will get the destruction you were promised. But it's too bad it's such a repetitive, unengaging, glaringly digital experience and worse than that, you'll have to sit through the disaster that is the rest of movie.

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.

There is something of a manufactured air to the proceedings, one that is acutely aware of the techniques and traits of other similar better film, but without the strength in writing to back it up.

Batra's film is ultimately less about love than about the vulnerability relationships place us in emotionally, and courage required to move past pain, and experience life again after we've been hurt.

Eventually settles into a dull routine much like the dissatisfied characters of the film, which will make for an easily dissatisfied audience.

Less a polemic than a portrait, If You Build It celebrates the flinty spirit that spurs problem solving and creativity (sometimes at the same time) with people not dedicated to a cause, but to people.

Patchy as often as its outright hilarious, fantastically outrageous just as frequently as its forgettable and flatlining, the sequel winds up a bit better than a second tier Ferrell outing.

The Punk Singer brings dimension and real shape to a band, era and scene that is often compartmentalized into one or two categories. That it'll get you wanting to start your own musical rebellion is a bonus.

For the most part, the most shocking thing about Swerve is how utterly straightforward it is.

By time the third act arrives, the film turns harshly toward cliché, convenience and melodrama to disastrous effect.

The 90-minute documentary doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is: a love letter to a great comic, providing a digestible version of its history with an eye to its legacy.

It may not strike the political notes it wants to hit completely, and may fall just short of the impact it would like to achieve, but Medora provides a sweet, small tale of survival, not just of a high school basketball team, but of a town trying not to get eaten up by supposed progress.

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.

Big Sur rises and fades, shifts and moves, through movements and melodies, singing a beautifully sad song for an era and a man who lost his way.

A thoroughly dull, conventional tale of two people who can't find a compromise on their individual priorities to be together.

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.

Spinning Plates navigates an industry that is more diverse and challenging than ever, but with this simple, fulfilling sampling, we learn that those behind the stove aim for the same kinds of rewards, accomplishments and satisfaction as their predecessors did.

Running a tight 80-odd minutes, Williams' documentary is as concise as it is affecting and powerful, but he leaves just enough room for some indirect hits at some of the more loathsome subjects of the documentary.

The insider look at the industry is appealing, and Seduced And Abandoned is enjoyable but lightweight, and if anything, reaffirms that art doesn't come easy.

When the end comes, and the suggestion of a sequel is left faintly lingering (though not in the way you’re expecting), weariness descends on just how unimaginative Carrie is and how easily it settles for the expected, rather than striving to be excitingly refreshing.

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

The documentary is often fascinating, even as it eschews any kind of traditional narrative.

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

Therese is almost voyeuristically distant from what's happening on screen, asking the audience to observe, but leaving just enough a gap of being completely engaged, that while everything is very well articulated, the impact is more academic than sensual.

Supermensch is a strong first outing from Myers that plays like that one round of drinks that gets everyone telling stories at the end of a boozy night.

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.

Totally bonkers, hilarious and wickedly clever, The Double is special and singular filmmaking at its best.

While there's no doubt that Shepard's film is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and impressively, wittily written, with a finely tuned ear for the perfect bit of foul language, it stumbles slightly on the story side.

Devil's Knot lacks potency or a compelling narrative reason why anyone remotely familiar with the case needs to be watching it.

Despite the fine performances from McConaughey and Leto, tightly coiled editing that keeps the story moving and a nicely measured balance between drama and comedy (McConaughey is often a hoot), Dallas Buyers Club still sometimes feels like it's missing one more grace note.

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.

Bad Words wants so desperately to be funny that there isn't much time left to make any logic out of the story.

Enough Said is another tremendously well crafted, intelligent dramedy about people, with complicated lives, who make bad decisions trying to do the right thing.

Mr. Nobody is simply a failure.

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.

For all the assuredness behind the camera and in front of it, there's very little in way of edge or even, surprisingly, emotion.

Rush is a pretty thrilling piece of pop entertainment. It's excitingly assembled and moves like a bullet, highly engaging and nerve-wracking when it needs to be and light on its feet elsewhere.

With a blitz of talking heads and graphs and technical jargon, Money For Nothing can be exhausting viewing at times, and it's certainly not the most cinematic experience... But it's never unclear.

A wholly illuminating look at Muhammad Ali in all his complexity, providing a surprisingly fresh and vivid portrait of a man who played rope-a-dope with history, religion and sport and emerged from the ring as an inspiring, and flawed icon.

Savannah does attempt to tell the story of the friendship of those two accomplished men, but does so in a manner that is so astonishingly tone deaf, confused and narrowly focused that it leaves you almost amazed at the lack of vision behind the entire enterprise.

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

With Elysium, Blomkamp has made good on the promise of "District 9" and proven that working on a bigger canvas doesn't mean compromising on smarts or aspirations to deliver tentpole sized stories with a thoughtful backbone.

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.

Broken simply can't get it together on any level, delivering a tedious drama, that for all the characters and over-emoting, doesn't have much to say.

Winter's detail oriented approach does at least give the best recounting of Napster you're going to get, even if it's a biased one. And while some contrasting opinions would've been appreciated, Downloaded is still worth a click.

Porter's film is not just a stirring testament to those taking on a Herculean task of bringing some sense of fairness and balance to an out of whack structure, but a reminder that there is still a far distance to go before everyone is equally represented in front of lady justice.

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.

White House Down wants to riff on the stirring action crowd-pleasers of old. But instead of playing on those motifs, White House Down becomes a slave to them, turning into the very kind of rote, brainless, poorly choreographed and leaden action movie it wants to lighten up.

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.

Although the documentary excels at giving us a better picture of the women who are inspiring folks around the world to voice support for them, Lerner and Pozdorovkin leave many other details unexplored.

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.

Leterrier's film is a reminder that sometimes a good yarn can do enough heavy lifting on its own to provide thrills. Whether or not the illusion pays off will be up to you, but the trick itself may be intriguing enough.

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.

This is a tremendously well written piece of work, with impressively developed characters, with scene after scene that further enriches and deepens our comprehension of their actions, yet never judges any of them. It certainly helps that Farhadi gets quartet of excellent, pitch perfect performances.

La Grande Bellezza washes over you in series of scenes, visages, sensations and impressions, and although in this case it doesn't quite gel into a cohesive whole, it's nonetheless a journey worth taking; a travelogue through memory and dreams, in which life is greatest fiction we could ever create.

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.

A b-movie potboiler at best, and indebted to countless other and much better films, this tedious, dumb, so-bad-it's-almost-funny procedural is an overstuffed thriller that offers one single idea, and proceeds to beat it to death, without much of anything to say.

Hirokazu has crafted a warm and lovely film that suggests the easiest thing about raising a child is embracing how complicated it can be.

Heli is a despairing, bleak watch. It's a slow, but unrelenting look at one young man's punishing loss of innocence amongst a society that has already decayed beyond understanding.