Michael Nordine

LeBlanc and Larter carry the day with a spectrum of charm missing from too many entries in this shaky, persistent genre.

The problem with The Human Experiment as an actual film and not just an anti-chemical treatise is that, though these people and the troubling statistics they cite are on the level, we're too rarely afforded the opportunity to reach our own conclusions based on them.

A film about individuals who refuse to be silenced could stand to take a few more chances itself.

Armstrong, who's mostly played himself in previous forays into acting, has a low-key charm suggesting that, if he desired it, he could get more onscreen gigs in between albums.

The problem with movies depicting the banality of anything, of course, is that they tend to be pretty banal themselves; in setting out to be the exception to that rule, Eye in the Sky only proves it.

The problem, then, is that too much of this is dispiriting without also being enlightening — the view Gallardo takes is almost that of a bird’s eye, showing much from an emotional remove but revealing little beyond surface-level horrors and characters so numb to it all that we’re left with little choice but to feel the same way.

Too bad the filmmaking never rises to the level of its subject.

Schlesinger seems in such a rush to guide us to the end unscathed that she sometimes loses sight of the small details that make this journey unique.

The writer-director's ideas about our connection to the land and the many other animals roaming it may well be profound, but they're buried under layers of superfluous storytelling devices. A better title would have been Adrift.

For all its aspirations toward movie magic with an activist bent, The Mermaid’s potential implications for the film industry are ultimately more noteworthy than the movie itself.

If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.

The story... could have worked well as a pitch-black comedy, but first-time director John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) takes the material so seriously that the mood never changes much after leaving the funeral home.

Sagawa is disturbed and alienated, but that doesn’t make him a compelling documentary subject in and of itself. Maybe that’s the point: Demystifying Sigawa takes away some of the near-mythic power that’s been attributed to him over the years.

The single-minded simplicity of its plotting can at times be an asset rather than a hindrance; in a summer even more bogged down by needless sequels and remakes than most, Crawl is, at the very least, a lean thriller that isn’t based on an existing property.

Makhmalbaf makes you feel the enormity of the president's loss of self even if you don't actually feel for him.

The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.

It's all steak, no sizzle — the opposite of Twisted Sister.

It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.

Come to Daddy has twists galore, not to mention a heavy dose of gore, but the further it drifts from its initial understated dynamic, the less each successive development seems to matter.

Mikkelsen, blessed with the rare ability to class up a joint while also being the most menacing guy in the room, is cast against type as a mustachioed philanderer; based on the evidence, his estimable talents are better suited to Hannibal.

We Are X is nothing you haven’t seen before as a music documentary, but it succeeds as an examination of why we turn to escapist art, and what we do when it’s no longer there.

Writer-director Chris Dowling handles that worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors.

The best villains are those whose motivations prove uncomfortably persuasive, and Knock Knock's drop-dead-gorgeous home invaders predicate their cruel game on too shaky a foundation to truly unsettle.

The film's premise rests on one contrivance too many as it is...and Heder keeps raising the stakes instead of settling into the groove established so well by her two leads.

In their abstraction, a number of striking animated sequences prove more effective in conveying these horrors than the talking-head segments that contextualize them.

Too artfully made for camp status but populated by characters too one-dimensional to stand alongside the likes of Once Upon a Time in China, Chow Hin Yeung's martial-arts epic, set in the late nineteenth century, is marked by blue-gray hues and some genuinely striking camerawork.

It isn’t involving enough for you to ever truly care about how these many, many problems will resolve themselves, and not funny enough for the experience to be more enjoyable.

Lemelson's interviews can be repetitive in their direct staging, but there's inspiration in his conceit of using a shadow-puppet performance set to gamelan music as interludes.