Mike D'Angelo

It’s a film of nearly pure sensation: woozy, intoxicating, visually gorgeous… and maddeningly repetitive.

Frequently charming. Marion-Rivard, who won Canada’s equivalent of the Best Actress Oscar earlier this year (the film itself won Best Picture), gives a strong, sophisticated performance, even as she’s disarmingly open in a way that would be almost impossible for an actor without Williams syndrome to fake.

Orson Welles famously called filmmaking “the biggest electric-train set any boy ever had,” and Raiders! captures that spirit without inviting the mockery that, say, American Movie does.

One hires Cage for a generic timewaster like this in the hope that he’ll make it at least a little more interesting on screen than it was on paper, by virtue of some crazed facial expressions and off-the-wall line readings, but he evidently wasn’t in the experimenting mood.

It’s a film that wants to celebrate as much as doom-say.

It’s a pleasure to see Shelton in her element again, guiding actors to places that feel unexpected yet authentic. Maron is an ideal match for her sensibility, and they make terrific scene partners, too. May this be the start of something special.

Barfly has few peers when it comes to pitch-black comedies of ill manners.

Paddleton takes its emotional cue from "Terms Of Endearment," expanding that film’s final stretch into an entire feature and replacing mother-daughter bonds with the deep but usually unspoken love shared by two male buddies.

The human brain, this movie suggests, is the ultimate horror-movie director, and sleep-paralysis hallucinations are just an extreme form of the standard-issue nightmares we all unwillingly create on a regular basis. It’s one thing to be tormented. It’s another thing to face the grim reality that you’re tormenting yourself.

The film is never less than fascinating, but it appears to be so intensely personal as to be all but indecipherable to viewers not personally acquainted with the filmmaker, or at least in possession of the press kit.

"Leviathan" (2014) pushed pitiless corruption into something like black comedy; Loveless is anything but funny, but does at least acknowledge fleeting moments of joy and understanding, even as it insists that they’re not nearly enough.

Where You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet added layers of meta-reflection to plays (by Jean Anouilh) that are terrific in their own right, Life Of Riley struggles in vain to find cinematic value in one of Alan Ayckbourn’s lesser efforts.

He’s (Riley Stearns) fashioned a movie that undergoes a slow, captivating metamorphosis, scene by scene, though who’s the caterpillar and who’s the cocoon remains unclear until the very end.

Gottsagen is too lively to be completely pinned down by feel-good clichés, and his unpredictability brings out the best in LaBeouf. As in most buddy pictures, so long as the chemistry works, all else is forgivable.

Nobody involved ever came up with an idea or character remotely worth exploring, yet they all forged ahead anyway, placing their faith in the filmmaking process itself, and this damp squib of an ostensible movie is the decidedly lackluster result.

The characters inhabiting this convoluted, tough-to-follow story feel too much like chess pieces, despite the refreshing multi-ethnic cast.

Perugorría is such a terrific, soulful actor that he makes Viva’s predictable dramatic trajectory — disapproving dad slowly grows to accept his child’s differences, while the kid gradually learns to forgive his father’s lifelong absence — seem a bit less moldy.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

Originally released at a time of national anxiety—four months before Pearl Harbor—the comic fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan positively radiates reassurement, in the form of a beatific and perpetually amused Claude Rains.

Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow.

With so much talent involved, there are inevitably some amusing moments, which keep tedium at least partly at bay.

Tackling another secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in The Unknown Known, Morris has finally met his match. The film is illuminating only in its utter lack of illumination — for looking deep into the eyes of someone incapable of letting his guard down and finding, predictably, nothing whatsoever.

Alas, while modern technology allows for impressive, convincing effects work on a comparatively tiny budget, the basic concept itself hasn’t improved with age. Clever ideas are still in short supply.

If nothing else, this is the least festive Christmas movie since "Bad Santa," dissecting the absurd belief that the holiday season can somehow magically cure all ills.

Smiling Faces is a strongly promising first effort, introducing a talented filmmaker who’s still in the process of finding his own voice. Still, don’t be too surprised if, three or four features down the road, it retroactively looks much more singular.

Throw in expert use of a picturesque yet oppressive location and Dark River almost manages to overcome narrative inertia via sheer force of will. It’s a beautifully crafted, moodily evocative film that’s missing just one spark of true inspiration.

Zero Motivation never stops being sharply funny, and there’s scarcely a hint of didacticism in its depiction of female soldiers who are essentially treated as a secretarial pool, so bored that they have to invent tasks to perform and create melodrama from scratch.

Mozhdah, appearing in her first film, can’t match the astonishing, bone-deep understanding of psychic masochism and involuntary complicity that Nicole Kidman brought to her similarly fraught therapy sessions in "Big Little Lies" — this film isn’t operating on that rarefied level in any respect, frankly — but she does manage, in this quietly harrowing scene, to make Nisha more than just a helpless victim.