Kevin Jagernauth

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Martin sets himself up with an ambitious endeavor for a first time feature, but unfortunately, it’s just out of his reach. Utilizing abstraction to achieve universal sensations is almost like pulling off a magic trick — it looks easy when done well, but the seams split and show when it doesn’t come off just right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.