Michael Nordine

It's like an odd storybook you'd find in the attic and have trouble putting down — the more quixotic Lian's journey becomes, the more you want her to see it through to the bitter end.

[Cox and Hirsch] add depth and dimension to the mystery they’re trying to unravel, even and especially as they unwittingly become part of it.

An extended riff on marital infidelity, this is the rare omnibus film that isn't just a mixed bag -- it very nearly succeeds at being uniformly bad.

As difficult as it can be to tell what’s real and what’s not here, it’s even more difficult to care: “Coma” seems to have poured out of Bonello stream-of-consciousness style, and analyzing it is about as rewarding as trying to make sense of the half-remembered dream your friend won’t stop talking about.

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.

You’ve seen many movies like this before, which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its charms.

Xenia has a winning streak of oddness.

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.

There's something to be said about a two-and-a-half-hour war epic that manages to make each of its countless decapitation scenes feel earned, even called for, in the moment.

The film mounts a competent offense as it shows how the Israeli squad overcame superior foes on the court and prejudice off of it.

“Christmas” is a cut above the usual holiday dross.

Denis Villeneuve's shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelganger while watching a movie and mines every bit of tension and oddity from it — there's hardly a scene that doesn't exude menace.

Somewhere in Queens is a low-stakes slice of life for much of its runtime, with most of the actual conflict stemming from a questionable decision Leo makes to ensure his son’s success. That doesn’t necessarily make it feel slight, however, as the film is such an affectionate love letter to the Italian American families who populate the eponymous borough that you don’t mind simply sharing the dinner table with them.

“Rise” is a serviceable — if also forgettable — entry in the cowabunga canon.

Fear Street in general and the 1978 chapter in particular are at their best when forging their own path, which makes it a shame when they’re too reluctant to walk it.

The result certainly isn’t fast food, but neither is it fine dining.

Set at a prestigious drama school and frequently engrossing, the film unfolds like an experimental acting workshop that occasionally falters when the plot intrudes on the performances.

There are no jump-scares in this sensuous thriller, and the lack of anything corporeal on which to focus our unease only makes Butter on the Latch more darkly exhilarating.

Dragged Across Concrete may be a hard movie to love, but it’s a much harder one not to respect and even admire.

Fightville's most worthwhile material tends to lie in the space between what its subjects say and what we know to be true.

Farmiga and Garcia give it their all, and their chemistry keeps certain scenes afloat.

Focusing on the moment-to-moment thrills proves more satisfying than wondering what actually sparked this intrigue.

Without coming across as a soapbox for narcs or unserious stoners, Rolling Papers gives a clearheaded account of things as they stand and where they might be headed.

Skyler Davenport’s lead turn in director Randall Okita’s no-nonsense thriller (which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last summer) will be worth remembering well after the January doldrums have passed.

There's nothing especially new or vital to these familiar scenes; ditto a late excursion into the realm of concussions — undoubtedly an epidemic for athletes of all stripes, but one that further muddles an already unfocused film.

This is a fun world to explore, but we’ve just barely scratched the surface by the time we’ve left it.

For much of its runtime, the film is simply there, decent for the most part, but at no point immersive.

The 100-Year-Old Man's equal-opportunity irreverence doesn't often translate to cleverness.

Despite Suresh’s oft-repeated mantra that “the world’s best never rest,” it’s hard not to wish that the movie itself would take more breaks and give father and son time to bond with one another.

A Hologram for the King succeeds at putting us in Alan’s meandering headspace, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find his journey as meaningful as he does.

Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.

There are too many notes that, while not false, are neither satisfactorily resolved nor left interestingly unresolved.

The film works because what it documents is less a transformation and more a return to a former, more natural state for its troubled protagonist.

If nothing else, Charlie Says succeeds in demystifying the man with a pentagram carved into his skull: He may be society’s go-to conception of evil, but he was also a drugged-out racist who wrote forgettable songs that even his acolytes probably didn’t enjoy as much as they were letting on.

As a sensory experience, Under Paris is never less than seaworthy.

Though Proxy shows early signs of being worthy of that vaunted company, it's brought down by some truly wooden performances and an inability to turn its interesting spark of an idea into a workable story.

Yet another documentary paean to an unsung musical act whose fringe staying power is as remarkable as its lack of mainstream coverage.

Nuestro tiempo ultimately feels like an extended couples-therapy session that we were invited to by mistake, with Reygadas playing both doctor and patient in a conflict of interest that goes unresolved.

With its harmonica-heavy score and rousing shots of these horse-riding antiheroes, Kundo's early and late scenes resemble a Western as much as the historical epic its middle section gradually turns into.

The film's most worthy detour is into the history and personal significance of masks.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

If we're grading on a curve, though — and seriously, it bears repeating: Fessenden is literally sixteen years old — it's impossible not to give the film kudos for being a not-bad genre exercise that shows promise for its precocious director.

Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.

It’s unfortunate that, even with this wealth of uncovered materials, I Am Ali still plays as a greatest-hits version of its subject’s life, offering little depth or insight into any one element of it.

The movie’s ending is misguided to the point of being perplexing rather than upsetting, recasting everything that came before it in a less favorable light. That’s a shame, as this father-daughter drama starring John Cho has more than its fair share of touching moments before hitting the roadblock that is its questionable third act.

Fuglsig’s feature debut is ultimately less an action movie and more a procedural, one in which incremental gains and minimal casualties are as much as can be hoped for.

Like the hardboiled detectives of yore, Too Late ultimately gets the job done — even if it's in its own off-the-books way.

Though far from perfect, Toad Road is also the first unique horror film to come along in years.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

The witch-hunt metaphor that emerges from Abigail’s bullying is more overt than it needs to be, but Shephard clearly didn’t rely on SparkNotes in crafting her film.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

It feels like an attempt to transpose the mix of thrills and prestige of a film like “Argo” onto a different true story, a paint-by-numbers approach that’s far less compelling than drawing outside the lines would have been.

Rarely ha-ha funny and never scary, it’s ultimately more sentimental than anything else — a clunky approach that undermines its strong performances.

While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

Jonathan Jakubowicz’s drama doesn’t add as much to the beyond-crowded World War II genre as it could despite the genuinely compelling true story on which it’s based.

While the landing isn’t as smooth as might be hoped for after the exemplary first act, neither does I.S.S. burn up on reentry.

The film’s low-key charms, such as they are, aren’t restrained by adherence to formula so much as its myopic worldview.

47 Meters Down sinks rather than swims, even if there are a few buoyant moments along the way.

It's refreshing that director Jim Taihuttu is more interested in the humdrum goings on of those who split their time between illegal and legitimate activities.

Red Christmas rarely deals in gore for gore’s sake in its early going. By the end, however, it becomes such an exercise in sensibility-testing brutality that any message about the fragility of the family unit is as murky as the cinematography.

Bier’s direction is coolly efficient, which fits the material to a t — anything more ostentatious would just feel wasteful.

Cliff Curtis is appealingly low-key as Christ, humble in a way that the film around him would have done well to emulate.

With a firm commitment to its alluringly offbeat premise and a grounding lead performance from Susanne Wuest, this indie oddity is an enjoyable descent into the absurd despite an apparent lack of interest in answering most of the questions it raises.

Has a lived-in, almost documentary-like realism to it, but as drama it's occasionally inert.

It's better than the first.

Enemies Closer captures the feel of action flicks of yore -- unsurprising, given that some of them were directed by Hyams himself -- in a way that only limited-release and straight-to-video titles seem allowed to these days (aside from the latest Riddick, that is).

The film is far less successful once it delves into body horror that makes Sarah's transformation as ghoulishly physical as it is mental.

For the first time, the story supports and adds to the action rather than distract from it; it’s almost as though Anderson was holding back in the earlier films because he wanted to save the best for last.

It’s a diverting enough entertainment from a group that has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of much more.

Worse than the latent silliness of such a premise is how little the filmmakers ultimately do with the world of narrative possibilities it presents; in attempting to show the universality of love, The Beauty Inside succeeds in showing the opposite.

The Den's commitment to its presentational conceit leads to a number of implausible scenarios, but what's more disheartening is the gore-fest it turns into once the curtain is thrown back on the mystery propelling both Elizabeth and the narrative.

The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.

The film avoids most of its genre's pratfalls, though it also shows little interest in transcending them.

Much like the music, Lords of Chaos is frequently unpleasant but oddly compelling — not least because Åkerlund ensures that the film never takes itself as seriously as its subjects did.

On-the-nose monologues on the cyclical nature of centuries-old blood feuds ultimately feel more like stuffy lectures than living history; ditto the film as a whole.

[Palermo] demonstrates an affinity for all things ethereal, even as he occasionally struggles to make space for himself in the long shadow of his estimable influences and reference points.

Blair Witch’s comparatively maximalist approach shows too much and scares too little.

Poots, who's quietly distinguished herself in a number of supporting roles over the last few years, brings a documentary-like naturalism to the familiar plotting; you'll care about her even if you begin to lose interest in the movie as a whole.

Every line of dialogue that follows from this tired premise is like an echo of one from a better movie.

The Whole Truth stands out within its evergreen genre for the largely unsensational manner in which it’s presented. Hunt follows actual courtroom procedures more closely than most similar movies...which makes the eventual revelations feel earned.

While it wouldn’t exactly be accurate to say that Dark Glasses was worth waiting a decade for, a world in which Argento continues working till the bitter end is preferable to one in which we don’t have movies like this at all.

Though quite silly, none of this feels self-reflexive or -satisfied. It delights in its own stupidity the way a dog rolls in dirt, but is nearly as difficult to get mad at after it muddies up the rug.

It's the kind of movie you'd find in someone's VHS collection, decide to watch based on the box art and title, and end up switching out for "The House of the Devil" instead.

Steve's voiceover monologues and dealings with a detective investigating a murder are straight out of the Patrick Bateman playbook, but turning the sociopathic cynicism up to eleven tends to be ineffective unless wit and insight are included in the mix.

While a bit of ironic detachment isn’t necessarily a hindrance, too many latter-day horror flicks’ attempts to show they’re in on the joke make it difficult to get invested in their stories. Despite initially appearing poised to repeat this too-cool-for-school mistake, “Someone” moves past it by emphasizing not vengeance but redemption.

Though it takes a long while for the many moving parts to click into place, the final minutes redeem not only a few characters but also Blood Ties itself -- not enough to make up for prior transgressions, perhaps, but enough to leave a favorable last impression.

The filmmaker isn't as nimble as he is ambitious, though, and you'll feel all 148 minutes of Brimstone's runtime — just maybe not in the way Koolhoven wants you to.

Watts, a veteran of the genre despite never quite being a scream queen, is delightfully disturbing in a role that requires her to mask her character’s true nature as well as her face.

As a film, the biggest issue with A Million Little Pieces isn’t whether any of this happened; it’s that, even if it did, none of it stands out from the many similar movies that came before it.

So far removed from any original signal — there are several direct references to Titanic, so it's timely, too — this nuance-free affair registers as little more than noise.