Michelle Orange

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

The result is the double shrift of a thinly sketched background and a story that has trouble standing up on its own.

Perry weaves together not just the individual stories but their arcs, sustaining the emotional tenor across the progress of nine lives.

With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.

The result is a shaggy rise-and-fall story that is deceptively well-wrought, playing at times like an extremely hip, deep-access concert film.

Ultimately, the effort, however rough in patches, is to be admired. We need our best minds on this subject, in all arenas, and Beautiful Boy is another jagged, early piece in a puzzle whose borders haven't formed yet.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

The casting of Jespersen, with his sub-Wookie intonations and granite stare, is key: If this pillar of masculinity says there be trolls, I don't have to be bitten by one to believe it.

The story is so bounteous that Goldwyn can't quite get a grip on it.

Timoner attempts - with talking heads, travelogues, and a little alarmist flair of her own - to articulate Lomborg's central idea that not doing enough good might be the same as doing harm.

Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.

If only the director had learned Mr. Han’s most important lesson: Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.

The latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.

"Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

One of the most chilling things about Trust is how well it lays out the grooming strategies used by expert predators.

Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.

Wilson's unflappable, deeply sympathetic affect and aging golden-boy visage have a very Jack-like smoothing effect on the story's rough patches.

It's difficult to get a firm grip on most of what Disco and Atomic War, constructed in a mish-mash collage style, has to offer.

A companion film to "Days of Glory," Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 feature about Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II, Outside the Law is another historical drama with a heavy heart and a knack for genre.

Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history.

Embedded in The Lie is a sharp look at the moral limbo of a complacent life, the self-defeat of committing by halves, the self-interest of false equivalencies - but only the shallowest attempts are made to chip its themes out.

I'd say you had to be there, but over the course of Magic Trip we learn that the majority of the people who were there didn't want to be there.

When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.

More redux than sequel, the final Shrek is more parent- (and specifically dad-) oriented than ever; it may also produce the first twinge of nostalgia in the kids who thrilled to the original at a formative age.

A few shots of full frontal and an actual devil to point to are poor substitutes for exposure and depth of character.