Mike D'Angelo

It’s a welcome throwback, moving at a brisk clip and allowing its impressive cast to embody some cherished archetypes.

Schlöndorff's Tin Drum, like most adaptations of great literature, serves mostly as a fascinating but superficial gloss on material that just doesn’t lend itself well to visual storytelling.

Things perk up when Fiennes belatedly appears, and while this isn’t one of the performances he’ll be remembered for, by any means, he delivers a fine moment of utter disgust at the government’s naked corruption in the film’s very last scene. Ending on that note feels right.

In the end, Mr. Nobody’s title is simply too apt.

In short, this is yet another doc that would make a first-rate book or lengthy article, gaining almost nothing from its chosen medium apart from (maybe) greater exposure. There’s no legitimate taxonomic reason for this material to be designated a film.

It’s remarkably assured and subtle work, worthy of comparison to Catherine Deneuve’s brilliantly blank turn in Buñuel’s film.

The more Electrical Life conforms to what one would expect of a Louis Wain biography, the less idiosyncratically compelling it becomes. An entirely fictional story loosely inspired by the man and his wife, but beholden to nothing, might have been genuinely electrifying.

Even if Cheap Thrills isn’t always plausible, though, it’s still a fair amount of twisted fun, thanks mostly to a surprisingly, effectively low-key turn by Koechner as the game’s emcee.

The film’s appeal, predicated on its rare close-up look at a working Bishop Of Rome, will be limited primarily to the faithful; those hoping for a candid portrait of the man beneath the cassock will be sorely disappointed.

Re-conceiving the tone was a smart move on Pesce’s part—a faithful, ultra-grim adaptation would likely have been unbearable. Trouble is, he loses his nerve. Or maybe he just ran out of ideas.

It’s the kind of sprawling, everything’s-connected moral tapestry that reached its nadir with Paul Haggis’ inexplicable Oscar winner Crash—not remotely as dire, thankfully, but with many of the same fundamental flaws.

Church’s indelible character study can only carry this wan, skeletal picture so far.

Jimmy’s Hall is one of [Loach's] clunkers: Footloose set in 1930s Ireland, basically, with jazz in lieu of Kenny Loggins.

It’s a folly of the first order, but one that many people will nonetheless want to see, if only because it’s so out there.

All in all, the original 1972 version of Weekend Of A Champion, which ran a fleet 80 minutes,was probably a thorough if minor pleasure. Unfortunately, that’s not the version now being released. Polanski says that he felt the need to re-edit the picture in order to make its rhythm more palatable to a modern audience.

The Ones Below is a thriller that exasperates more than it thrills.

The film is strongest when simply exploring the terrible notion of triage among the healthy, with everyone involved fully aware of which individual will be deemed the most expendable.

The film shrewdly keeps us inside Chloe’s head, filtered through her very limited comprehension of her burgeoning and truly awesome abilities.

Moss spends the better part of a year just trying to get his subject to betray some raw emotion, even going so far as to have Chasten pose interview questions at one point. It’s not as if Buttigieg stonewalls the camera, either. He’s just not, at heart, a very demonstrative guy.

Sincerity and good intentions are all it has going for it, alas, and the result is the cinematic equivalent of a plate full of spinach.

Parental anxiety has long been fertile ground for horror, going back to "The Bad Seed" and "The Exorcist," and The Hole In The Ground finds a somewhat fresh angle on the possessed-kid subgenre.

As a primer, however, the film does the job, albeit less thoroughly and with more needless digressions than would even a lengthy magazine article on the subject.

Give Love And Monsters credit: If nothing else, it does at least come up with a new (albeit ludicrous) twist on the killer-asteroid premise that once fueled two dumb disaster movies in the same year.

Like many of Joe Swanberg’s recent efforts, Stinking Heaven plays like a potentially strong idea for a movie that never quite takes shape, which is the problem with “writing” a movie while the camera rolls.

If the thought of seeing a lot of people get murdered with automatic weapons at close range makes you queasy right now, Hotel Mumbai is not a film you want to go anywhere near. Few slasher movies have such a high, graphic body count.

Neither Ripstein nor his wife and regular screenwriter, Paz Alicia Garciadiego, succeed in unearthing (or inventing) anything of more than sensational interest from this tragedy.

Cohen and McAuliffe fail to distinguish their characters from the umpteen previous iterations of “sensible guy and his hotheaded best friend,” and the film winds up less interested in their relationship than in the compelling details of the smuggling operation, with which they’re only tangentially associated.

There’s just not much of real import in this quasi-historical semi-thriller.