Michael Rechtshaffen

Thanks to a trio of solid performances (especially the dryly bitter O'Shaughnessy, who suggests a young Helena Bonham Carter), this first feature, although a tad long, nevertheless emerges as a diabolically effective anti-date movie.

Unfortunately in the hands of writer-director Adam Alecca, this overly talky, slackly executed game of cat-and-mouse comes off as cheesy rather than chilling.

The immensely likable Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is a freshly contemporary change-up on the traditional cross-cultural romantic-comedy.

Greenaway's boundary-pushing, breathlessly in-your-face approach begins to take its toll on viewer patience.

Tumbledown sees its good intentions undermined by cloying sitcom conventions.

Jane Got A Gun may not have reinvented the wagon wheel, but it rolls out as a sturdy, well-crafted genre piece despite its rocky road to the screen.

It’s hard to imagine how anything salvageable could have been made out of [Gee Malik Linton's] comically pretentious script with its heavily religious overtones and plotting that grows more ridiculous by the minute.

Ip Man 3, set in Hong Kong circa 1959, combines the customary, inventively choreographed action with an unexpected emotional depth, proving as hard to resist as its entertaining predecessors.

While the storyline, in which Jack Black’s dumpling-downing Dragon Warrior is reunited with his biological father, doesn’t quite fulfill its prophecies, dramatically speaking, visually speaking it’s all quite impressive — one of those very rare animated features that completely justifies its 3D glasses.

The sci-fi drama 400 Days ultimately disintegrates upon impact because of a lazy payoff.

While the film, with its preponderance of potty jokes, might placate the very young already primed by boisterous singing chipmunks, older viewers will likely find it all harder to, uh, bear.

While the early going might bring to mind the Dogme 95 school of stripped-down filmmaking...the result, with its collective of uniformly unsympathetic characters, ultimately overdoses on all the unscripted bad vibes.

Embracing the worst of Hollywood excess, director Wuershan crams in enough CG effects to fill a dozen Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay features, but the uninspired payoff quickly grows tiresome.

Employing a restless, constantly moving camera and deliberately isolating soundscapes, the meditative and often mesmerizing film confronts the global issue of swelling immigration in the face of steely bureaucratic indifference with a disarming grace and palpable humanity.

No less noisy, obnoxious or just plain groan-inducing than the previous installments.

The film itself often feels stilted and repetitive.

While the corrupt Indiana Jones conceit certainly held promise, the Hesses fail to move it much further beyond that "what if" premise, taking weak, obvious potshots at its fundamentalist target.

Filled with humanitarian good cheer — and enough costume changes to rival a Diana Ross concert — Imba Means Sing delivers a heartwarming song of hope for the future.

The visually stirring format proves unable to lift the story and performances out of a prevailing, airless stupor.

A richly crafted documentary that serves as an enlightening tribute to the filmmaker who masterfully tapped into the medium's wide-reaching socio-political potential.

Drone is a solid, thought-provoking documentary that raises some pertinent questions even if they may not originate from the most objective of places.

Working from a glib, chatty script by Robert Lowell that's not as cleverly hatched as it likes to think it is, Haley whips it into something reasonably entertaining.

Succeeds despite an intrusive soundtrack that underscores each genuinely heartfelt moment.

The Dark Horse is an emotionally potent story of redemption anchored by a heart-piercing lead performance from Cliff Curtis.

The Good Dinosaur emerges as a visually breathtaking work of computer-generated animation that is ultimately unable to compensate for a disappointingly derivative script.

As vapidly generic as its title, British director Scott Mann's Heist is a by-the-numbers crime thriller that squanders a decent cast, including Robert De Niro, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Dave Bautista.

The unifying power of music is rewardingly demonstrated in Song of Lahore.

Frequently laugh-out-loud funny and tangibly tender where it ought to be, the immensely satisfying screwball romp feels freshly contemporary even as it largely conforms to genre conventions.

This first feature is populated by blandly underdeveloped main characters who tend to recite their lines rather than inhabit them.

Director Kishan SS has made Care of Footpath 2 (a.k.a. Kill Them Young) as a bombastic, overlong melodrama that doesn't recognize the occasional need to takes things down a decibel or three.

Boasting a sizable budget, stirring photography and Arcilla's charismatic lead performance, Heneral Luna would never be mistaken for more serious-minded art-house material, but there are certainly less lively ways to be taught a history lesson.

A delightful romp that captures the spirit of the adored 65-year-old comic strip.

Even if the world had been clamoring for yet another "Step Up"-type hip hop dance movie, it wouldn't be Dancin' It's On!, an inept knockoff that proves every bit as clunky as its punctuation-challenged title.

A fascinating, skillfully assembled chronicle of the rise and inevitable fallout surrounding the granddaddy of the environmental activism movement.

Although Fontaine, a former soap opera actor, hits the saga's sins-of-the-fathers theme too often, there's a palpable small-town-in-transition feel to the fictional Braxton.... And there's no denying Fontaine's reflective but rumpled Rolando Ramirez is an interesting protagonist.

Copeland's victories are shortchanged by the film's prevailing sense of detachment from its main subject.

Taking those Hail Mary passes to heart, Woodlawn is a heavily Christian sports drama that almost goes the distance despite adhering closely to the inspirational movie playbook.

They may not do enough to alter the climate change film landscape, but Klein and those impassioned protesters provide something that has been in short supply in the predecessors — namely, a modicum of hope for the future.

The compelling film, like its energetic young stars, is in constant motion. Although the nominally gritty tone occasionally gives way to the director's weakness for the theatrical, the film is rooted by that trio of engagingly authentic performances.

The whole package, with its bizarre fondness for slow motion, feels correspondingly sluggish. All the components are here, but A Faster Horse cries out for more dynamic performance.

A playful deconstruction of the slasher film that ultimately packs a surprisingly affecting punch.

Keeping the creepy/kooky mix entertainingly intact, Goosebumps translates R.L. Stine’s frighteningly successful young adult horror fiction series to the big screen with lively, teen Ghostbusters-type results.

Narcopolis starts off intriguingly and ends solidly. It's everything else in between that isn't particularly compelling.

Systematically yet subtly, the Bolings and their strong cast take this certifiably oddball film in some thoughtfully intriguing places.

The term "inspirational" gets bandied about a lot, but Becoming Bulletproof is thoroughly deserving of that tag.

Australian Mendelsohn (sporting a pitch-perfect American accent) and Reynolds are terrific, each wrapping himself up in the material like a well-worn favorite sweater.

A dull, meandering romantic comedy with serious believability issues.

Like an uncle making a long-winded, embarrassing toast to the bride, Smith may have a lot of defining childhood memories at his disposal, but that doesn't mean they all need to be shared.

There's infinitely more than one anomaly to be found in The Anomaly, a thoroughly nonsensical futuristic sci-fi thriller that makes a case for the perils of vanity projects.

The film slowly, painfully declines from merely oddball to awful, with vapid dialogue and muddy character motivations, particularly where Woll's unsympathetic Alice is concerned.

This time around, greater attention has been paid to story and character development (while scaling back on all the sight gags) and the substantial results give the ample voice cast and returning director Genndy Tartakovsky more to sink their teeth into, with pleasing results.

Commercial director Shyam Madiraju, making his feature debut, demonstrates a spare, sinewy visual grip on the low-budget film, especially during that crash sequence. But the mechanical script strands a capable young cast in a sea of hackneyed character types and soggy platitudes.

Although the lead performances, including a turn by Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark on "Game of Thrones") as a no-nonsense police chief, are uniformly solid, the hollow Montana has trouble unloading all those stolen parts.

It's all pleasant enough, but the film, ultimately more of a checklist than an in-depth analysis, never really shines any fresh light on Canada's identity crisis or gets to the source of all those preconceived notions.

Despite its serious imperfections, the soapy escapism provided by The Perfect Guy at least arrives at an opportune time.

Beginning with a gentle lullaby and ending with a tightly packed wallop, Goodnight Mommy is one viscerally chilling, seriously unsettling horror film.

Being big on improvisation doesn't necessarily mine nuggets of comic brilliance, and there are times you wish Argott and Joyce would have adhered more closely to the Matt Serword-penned script.

The film takes a long time to get going because of all the prolonged, glib chit-chat that loses whatever satirical edge it might have initially possessed.

An intelligent actor whose sad sack demeanor has often been put to good use by director Wes Anderson, most effectively in "Rushmore," Schwartzman does similarly well by Byington, whose slight portrait (taking its name from the title of an R.E.M. song) might not otherwise sustained its quirky charm without him.

Preachy doesn't begin to describe War Room, a mighty long-winded and wincingly overwrought domestic drama.

Instead of taking the audience in unfamiliar directions, filmmaker Mora Stephens (who wrote the script with Joel Viertel) is in such a heated rush to get to all the salacious bits, the story doesn't build crucial dramatic tension.

What should be a sexually and emotionally charged atmosphere instead ends up feeling like an intellectual exercise, with the actors attempting mightily to simulate chemistry that simply doesn't exist.

What begins as a quirky portrait of the artist as a gringo mariachi troubadour proves to be a telling study of a lost soul whose palpable passion for his music acts as a surrogate for more meaningful human contact.

The rise-and-fall trajectory of Knievel's career is colorfully captured in Daniel Junge's Being Evel, a savvy documentary that gives the granddaddy of extreme sports his due while gauging the national climate that welcomed his shrewdly timed arrival.

Learning to Drive is a richly observed, crosscultural character study that coasts along pleasurably on the strengths of its virtuoso leads.

Director Grau seems to be making up the film as he goes along — never a good idea when tackling the sort of genre piece that requires building tension and some semblance of dread to succeed.

Packing plenty of visual zip and terrific character faces into its compact running time, De Jong never allows the considerable quirkiness to upstage the storytelling.

An unpleasant exercise in self-indulgence

The director nimbly orchestrates to entertaining effect this mass game of cat-and-mouse populated by paid and unpaid assassins, double agents and even the proverbial twins separated at birth.

The plodding film goes awfully heavy on script exposition and all too light on character depth, leaving Cage and company — including a smartly cast Peter Fonda as his been-there, done-that alcoholic dad — to come up with their own complexity.

Resembling something dwelling in the bottom of the remainder bin, The Seventh Dwarf is a garish-looking, slapdash mashup of an animated fairy tale.

Even with an energetic approach by co-directors Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge and fittingly playful narration by Jason Bateman, you can't help but hear a little "ka-ching!" every time images of a shiny new creation fill the screen.

Many of Gameau's findings won't come as earth-shattering revelations, but he takes a resourceful approach to presenting the material, coating all the inconvenient truths in kid-friendly, brightly colored graphics and zippy animations.

With its solid performances, nice attention to period detail and a foreboding rumble of a symphonic score by Jan Duszynski, Jack Strong adds a unique Eastern Bloc POV to the enduring Cold War movie arsenal.

Twinsters is a lively — and quite lovely — take on contemporary notions of family and identity.

The film taps into some genuine, relatable truths lurking beneath all that try-too-hard quirkiness.

Expertly playing with our preconceived notions, Granik's multidimensional portrait also serves as a telling state-of-the-union address, as seen through the caring eyes of her philosophical main subject.

Rather than sticking with that entirely workable setup, writer-director Martin keeps distractedly flip-flopping back and forth in time leading up to the big heist, preventing the plotting from building any tangible tension.

Lila & Eve is a standard-issue female vigilante thriller that's skillfully elevated by the performances of leads Viola Davis and Jennifer Lopez.

Pablo Fendrik's Ardor is a densely atmospheric, Sergio Leone-steeped western that ultimately proves too reverential for its own good.

Holdridge and Saasen simply lack the acting chops to carry their feature, leaving them with a scenic but indulgent selfie of a big-screen romance.