Mike D'Angelo

Van Warmerdam keeps things engrossingly ominous throughout, and Bijvoet has a lot of fun with his passive-aggressive creepazoid, but Borgman is both too self-consciously odd and too bluntly punitive to draw real blood.

A surprisingly nasty piece of work, more reminiscent of old John Dahl thrillers from the ’90s (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction) than of "Let’s Be Cops."

At bottom, this is the story of freaks and geeks everywhere: a quest for the like-minded, rooted in obsessive engagement with a tiny sliver of pop culture.

The script is consistently either overexplicit or undernourished, and there’s only so much two fine actors can do.

The open secret in Amy Berg’s documentary An Open Secret is that child actors are regularly molested by the adults — managers, publicists, producers — who help them launch their careers. Such an important subject deserves a serious, thoughtful film. Instead, it got Berg (Deliver Us From Evil, West of Memphis), who’s prone to all manner of cheesy manipulation.

Peterloo does get progressively more compelling as it goes. Leigh hasn’t lost his knack for finding first-rate but relatively little-known actors.

Unfortunately, like most home movies, it’s of precious little interest to non-relatives.

Don’t get too excited: Not only is there nothing especially dirty about Dirty Weekend, the latest and lamest film by erstwhile provocateur Neil LaBute, but the movie doesn’t even occupy an entire weekend.

The movie is almost literally a trial to watch, demonstrating all the passion and excitement of an unedited C-SPAN broadcast.

The cast is immensely appealing, the heist is ingenious, and the collision of hardscrabble working-class kids and Sideways-style alcohol snobs generates steady laughs, though somewhat predictable ones.

There’s no much going on here, either thematically or narratively.

It does offer a very amusing portrait of guile and idiocy. Think of it as a divertissement. Both Austen and Stillman would surely approve.

A musical with numbers written by The National was a terrific idea, and so was Dinklage as Cyrano. Just not at the same time.

For a first-time director, Amini demonstrates considerable skill both with actors and with the camera, giving the film a pungent balance of visual elegance and moral seediness.

The result feels like an experiment to determine whether sheer creativity can transform the mundane into the magical, and qualifies as a partial success. If nothing else, you have to concede that they tried.

In Fear takes place almost entirely inside a moving car, severely limiting both the cast’s isolation (a big factor in Blair Witch’s strategy) and the extent to which they could wander off in an unexpected direction. Instead, the film simply goes in circles.

As vicarious, you-are-there re-creations of historical events go, it’s creditably workmanlike; whether that’s the best use of the dream factory is another matter.

Following the self-importance of recent (and inexplicably prizewinning) films like Arirang and Pieta, however, Moebius feels like a giddy, playful return to form. It’s as uproarious as genital mutilation gets.

The ending is intended to be ambiguous, but it’s not too hard to guess what happened in advance, as it’s the only dramatically satisfying option. What’s no longer at all certain is what it means.

[Graf's] handsomely mounted, beautifully acted epic biopic (running just shy of three hours) succeeds in reducing the lives of three important figures in German literary history to a rather banal love triangle.

There’s a fascinating story here, but the movie never gets out of its own way long enough to tell it.

Félix & Meira eventually proves to have more in common with "Fill The Void," and with Burshtein’s effort to depict Orthodox Judaism as more than just a women’s prison, than it had appeared.

Enjoy the wordplay in the title, because that’s as witty as the horror comedy Life After Beth ever gets.

Staying Vertical is distinguished largely by its poker-faced playfulness. Bonnard is a wonderfully quizzical presence in the lead, expertly creating the impression of a person who has no idea what he wants but is nonetheless determined to get it.

Hodierne’s intentions were unquestionably good—he spent years researching the short and feature, working with Somali non-pros—but he still managed to fall into the same trap as the other American films on this subject, focusing on individuals rather than group dynamics.

Hearts Beat Loud is smart, sincere, expertly performed (though Ted Danson, in a small role as Frank’s favorite bartender, gets little to do apart from echo Sam Malone), quietly progressive (Sam’s ethnicity and sexuality elicit no onscreen comment whatsoever), and just thoroughly… nice.

It’s a feature-length whine of frustrated entitlement. A movie less suited to its cultural moment would be hard to imagine.

Director Megan Griffiths, best known for the grim human-trafficking drama "Eden," proves surprisingly adept at this lighter material, maintaining a slightly loopy tone that serves to make the occasional dramatic moments all the more piercing.