Kevin Jagernauth

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

On Chesil Beach makes us consider the lives of the Florence and Edward as outside observers, but rarely takes us inside the complicated mix of desire and fear this pair is trying to untangle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The movie is basically The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Mad Man, but don't be shocked if you find yourself asking just what art he was practicing in the first place.

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.

Yes, the idea is unique. But they aren't quite ready to shake off what has worked for them for years -- namely making girls want to be special and popular, and boys strong and heroic.

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.

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

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.

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

The trio (Hoffman/Keener/Walken) give top shelf performances as we've always come to expect from them in A Late Quartet. But it's just too bad that they're in service of Yaron Zilberman's film, which takes the unique focus of a string quartet in Manhattan, and puts it in the middle of a standard and unsatisfying soap opera, that spins off into one subplot too many.

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

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.

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.

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

Too long by at least a half hour, and both dull and repetitive as it goes on, Cloud Atlas reaches for envelope-pushing storytelling but never delivers on its promise.

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

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.

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.

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.

Unfocused, and feeling mostly incomplete in even the most basic standards of documentary film, This Time unfortunately reflects an amateur approach that is felt not just in the filmmaking but in the very people trying to bring The Sweet Inspirations, Pat Hodges and Bobby Belfry to bigger recognition.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There is a fine line between meeting an audience halfway and witholding enough without falling into self-indulgence, but Kiarostami can't make that balance here. Enigmatic and dull to a maddening degree, Like Someone In Love finds Kiarostami spinning his wheels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Director Ari Sandel, working with a script by Josh A. Cagan, doesn't have the deftness to really convey how Bianca's personality turns conventional wisdom into her own unique, attractive qualities.

If Playing It Cool is meant to be an ironic interpretation of what happens to these characters, the film isn't sharp, smart or insightful enough about how actual humans interact to pull it off.

The Impossible strikes an insincere tone, one that doesn't let the obviously powerful moments stand on their own, but instead follows the beautiful Hollywood stars to safety, while the real story is left on the ground.

Felony isn't a federal case of a bad film, but it's certainly a serious misdemeanor, one whose crime is running away from the challenge the story sets up, to settle on something cheap and conventional.

Aiming for a trifecta of small kids, their older sisters and parents in the audience, Fun Size fails them all in a movie that is neither a trick nor a treat.

An audience’s mileage for Hedda will depend on how much they enjoy watching what is little more than a parlour game between the pampered upper classes.