Michael Nordine

At times there's no way to be sure whether what's on screen is scripted or candid, a formal tension that keeps the film on its toes while also underscoring that it's more effective as an experiential mood piece than it is as a drama.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If anything, delving into action/comedy territory distracts from what made the original kinda-sorta touching at a few key moments: the heart beneath the hijinks. It’s still beating here, but not as strongly as it did the first time.

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

There's little new information here, and the structural monotony of The Anonymous People's voiceover and talking-head presentation often makes it feel less like dynamic, insightful filmmaking and more like a well-intentioned PSA.

Mr. Jones is the stuff of both conspiracy theories and collegiate discourse, and Mueller's elliptical exploration and creation of that mythology sets the bar a bit too high for his much-less-interesting protagonists to fully clear.

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

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.

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.

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.

Out of the Shadows stumbles from one set piece to the next, rarely offering viewers much reason to care in between, and its halfhearted attempts at moving toward the “dark and gritty” end of the comic-book spectrum never land.

The question with a movie like Jigsaw, which was preceded by seven “Saw” movies and did not screen for press, isn’t “Is it good?” but rather “How bad is it?” The answer, dear reader, is “quite.” Jigsaw is quite bad.

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.

Like many docs with activist undertones, Second Opinion tells a potentially interesting story in a bland way.

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.

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.

Out Loud is too clumsily put together to give its subject the weight it needs to feel both grounded and moving.

One test for movies like this is whether they bemoan the inevitable gore or revel in it; The Human Race too often falls into the latter, amplifying and focusing on the bloodshed.

Co-writer/director Matt Rabinowitz doesn’t artfully withhold information so much as lay it all on the table a bit earlier than he might have.

A self-aware, borderline self-reflexive action-comedy from the Netherlands, Arne Toonen's Black Out is derivative in a way that undermines its wry sense of self.

As with many other WWII films, it takes genuinely stirring source material -- a young Hungarian man poses as a Nazi to find his dislocated family -- and reduces it to its most shopworn components.

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.

Though its loose, improvisatory feel is suited to the material, most of its humor feels like the first draft of a better film — as though the entire movie consists of what should have been deleted scenes.

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

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.

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

Initially engrossing as it is, the maximalism loses power sometime in the second act.

Before devolving into the same series of demonic faces and jump-scares we've seen time and again, The Forest is a genuinely unnerving mood piece.

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.

There are more tears than the title lets on, and even more blood, but it's a reason to truly be invested that's missing from No Tears for the Dead, which is rarely any better or worse than serviceable.

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.

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

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.

Green Dragons wants to be spaghetti with marinara, but it's closer to egg noodles and ketchup.

Far better as a family drama than as a gangster picture, the film's muddled attempt at marrying the two distracts from its emotional center.

Too by-the-numbers for the emotional impact to resonate as long as it could and should have.

It's easy to get lost in the natural beauty of Vermont, and Mosher (who worked on the film with several students as part of a Marlboro College program) clearly takes joy in doing so. The liveliest counterpart to that striking landscape isn't Dern, but rather Jessica Hecht as his wayward daughter, who hits all the grace notes the rest of the film tends to miss.

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.

Rob Zombie can do better than 31. For proof, just watch any other Rob Zombie movie.

“Who asked for this?” is the question such projects invoke, and Lindsey Anderson Beer’s film never comes up with a satisfying answer.

That all the good things--and there are several--Red Lights has going for it are ultimately in service of an ending that might even make M. Night Shyamalan cringe represents one of the year's biggest missed opportunities.

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.

The whole affair feels, quite simply, icky in a way that superior projects like “Zodiac” and “Memories of Murder” never do; to his movie’s detriment, Akin seems more interested in merely depicting what happened than taking a stab at why.

A generous reading suggests that its vaguely feminist subtext is intentional rather than a happy accident, and to some extent it may well be, but for the most part Hell Fest simply adheres to long-established genre tropes.

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.

The plot is that most dreadful of mixes: both laughably silly and needlessly complicated.

No one in the movie rises above the level of a stock character, so over-the-top in their familiar jokes as to barely even register as satire.

Those who favor gore above all else will be at home amid the blood and guts, but others should heed the obvious warning invited by the title: don't watch it.

By far the highest concentration of actual humor comes during the blooper reel over the end credits; free of the script’s saccharine constraints, the performers immediately demonstrate their chops.

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

Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.

Returning director Tim Story lays out the narrative wares with all the subtlety of a neon sign on the Strip, not that the screenplay from Keith Merryman and David A. Newman (who also co-wrote the first one) gives him much to work with.

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.

The gradual revelation that there's more to Daisy than meets the eye is no great surprise, but it does at least negate — too late! — some of the more troubling subtext.

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.

Roth amplifies that exploitation flick's least interesting components (gore, cruelty) at the expense of all others.

Co-writer/director Jonathan English ups the viscera and nudity at the expense of a compelling narrative, which was hardly the original’s strong suit (if indeed it had one) anyway.

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.

The main enticement is getting to see Cage go full bore. And he does, gesticulating wildly and assuming an unplaceable accent, but as the only combustible element in this otherwise lackadaisical film, his energy ends up bouncing around with nowhere to go.

Practically every scene is a cliché, every line of dialogue an echo of a better one you’ve already heard in a better film.

Most of the film's major happenings are either illogical or, much more damningly, not especially thrilling.

Mild schadenfreude aside, however, the film inspires almost no feeling at all — even the Friday the 13th movies bother giving the bad guy a backstory.

The film is content to merely document certain happenings and hope you find them as interesting as it does.

Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.

The film likens prostitution to a continuation of the slavery that was eradicated two decades earlier by a certain Proclamation, but never bothers letting any of the working girls emancipate themselves.

It would almost be impressive how many funny people it took to make something so unfunny — the full ensemble includes Nick Kroll, Allison Tolman, Michaela Watkins and Rob Huebel — only it’s difficult to be impressed when you’re focused on how little you’re laughing.

A Dark Truth is one of those unfortunate projects whose component parts are immediately at odds with one another.