Martin Tsai

As far as documentaries go, the film is exhaustively researched, interviewed and documented.

The documentary Pay 2 Play lays out a compelling case against corporate personhood and money as free speech.

It's a derivative trove of swashbuckling action, romance, comedy, special effects and revisionist history — the kind of film that would be pitched to studio execs as "Pirates of the Caribbean" meets "Free Willy."

More objectivity would have made this case study a lot more persuasive.

The film feels like a sketch rather than a portrait, beautifully rendered but incomplete in the details.

Like so many filmmaking wunderkinds who could have used a course in common sense, Glanz is technically assured but emotionally hollow.

This cautionary tale certainly has a chilling and timely message of how wars make monsters out of innocent people. But using reductive caricatures — complete with phlegmatic performances — to send that message is perhaps not the best way, because it turns something with modern-day implications into distant allegory.

Above all, its gratuitous graphic gore and exploitative nudity are unmistakably giallo. What "The Strange Color" lacks is the heart that separates a good film from a great one.

Although this film doesn't miss the whole point of found footage as the recent "Into the Storm" did, Jung does little to help suspend our disbelief.

It's essentially a glorified PowerPoint presentation that juxtaposes archival footage — an echo chamber of interviews, readings and performances taken entirely out of context — with amateurish stock footage and a short running time.

Though Mission Blue gets its title from Earle's nonprofit organization, the film rarely comes across as propaganda.

After catalogs so many clichés in the dysfunctional family at its center that the film could be taught in a screenwriting class as a lesson in what not to do.

By allowing Cameron's first-person account to take command of the narrative, though, the film seems to gloss over meaningful logistics of the expedition.

37: A Final Promise comes off as a paranormal and schizophrenic take on a Lifetime movie with themes of terminal illness and assisted suicide.

This journey into "Martha Marcy May Marlene" territory is never as tense and gripping as it should be, the incidents and most of the performances too tamped-down to spark a much-needed sense of animating friction.

Aside from the film's double-entendre title and typical slasher-movie poster, director Quist and screenwriter Ponickly have given us nothing to fear.

Making sense was never a top priority for "K," and its sequel is just as much of a hot mess.

Writer-director Larry Brand is all too eager to show off his cleverness. Bad dialogue and Cinemax aesthetics make all the clichés seem even more clichéd.

It's far more invested in elaborate historical reenactments, hypothetical dramatizations and special effects than interviews, research and data.

The method to Von Trier's madness is that he provokes thought alongside outrage in his parables. Here, Gebbe musters only outrage, as her antagonists are without nuance, mercy or any redeeming quality.

In spite of its insufferably whimsical tendencies — exemplified by its original title, "Oh Boy" — the film may have turned out to be a deeply profound modern postscript about fascism. This isn't that far-fetched a reading at all.

At its best, the film seems as dreary a travelogue as that Nia Vardalos vehicle "My Life in Ruins." At its worst, Chaplin of the Mountains feels like an overambitious film-school thesis with superfluous political and philosophical posturing.

One Candle, Two Candles proves worthwhile at least as a cultural curio.

Miss Lovely does exude an air of authenticity... But much of the film remains underdeveloped.

The AIDS scare remains as much window dressing as do other period details such as rotary phones and cassette tapes. Test seems to be about dance above all, with choreographed montages filling the bulk of its running time.

The film is certainly interesting, despite the fact that it's a glorified promotional video for Muniz's installations.

Director Megan Griffiths and writers Huck Botko and Emily Wachtel flesh out a female perspective that's refreshing and engrossing without demonizing or objectifying men.

The film supplies a succession of hyper-stylized and potent set pieces without ever establishing any sort of internal logic.