Mike D'Angelo

All the same, Tickled does shine a much-needed light on that individual’s long history of abusive behavior, which has resulted in only a light slap on the wrist, thanks to inherited wealth and the power it confers.

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.

Rich detail and strong performances do battle with coming-of-age clichés in King Jack, an indie drama that winds up feeling overly beholden to the dictates of various screenwriting manuals.

From Afar plays like a typical first feature, with ambition outstripping execution by a hefty margin.

Without Wong Kar-Wai’s visual grandeur to provide a sense of the epic, The Final Master just lurches clumsily from one scene to the next, flatlining whenever fists aren’t flying.

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

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.

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

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

It’s worth seeing just for its object lesson in how shifts in perspective can radically alter the tenor and meaning of material that might otherwise come across as pompously silly.

Being Charlie is Rob Reiner’s best film in at least two decades — admittedly a low bar to clear, given the competition (which includes such forgotten piffle as Alex & Emma and Rumor Has It…), but even a modest Meathead comeback is more than welcome.

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.

The only way to enjoy this movie is to concentrate on its frequently stunning compositions and ignore the fact that none of it makes even a tiny lick of sense.

The film is grotesque and bizarre without ever really being funny, and while the sight of Mikkelsen as a nebbishy loser is initially bracing, the novelty wears off fast, leaving little else.

Nina has been so thoroughly misconceived, on virtually every level, that the only less interesting portrait imaginable would be one that takes place entirely when Nina Simone was in utero.

Brizé doesn’t have the Dardennes’ gift for narrative complexity, and he stacks the deck against his hero more than is really necessary.... But The Measure Of A Man’s beating heart is Lindon’s performance.

Beautiful people living in beautiful houses surrounded by stunningly beautiful Canadian landscapes dominate the aptly titled An Eye For Beauty, which unfortunately also demands a stomach for tedium.

Writer-director Gabriel Mascaro doesn’t really have a story to tell about these folks, but he does have a wealth of almost documentary-style detail to share, plus style to burn, and that’s nearly enough.

Almost paralyzingly dull until its last few minutes.

So give Don Cheadle credit for innovation, at least: His Miles Davis biopic (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in), Miles Ahead, tackles the problem head-on… by inventing cinematic things for Davis to do when he’s not playing music, including ludicrous car chases and gunfights.

A non-professional making his screen debut, Paradot serves up plenty of volatility, but he never quite succeeds in making Malony seem like a kid with real potential that’s being squandered.

Valley Of Love is at its best when it wanders away from its ostensible premise and just lets two old pros connect, riffing lightly on our knowledge of their real-life histories.

With a cast this talented...Get A Job is never painful to endure, but neither does it ever rise above lazy mediocrity.

What makes this film more potentially enticing to Westerners than the seven films that preceded it? Two words: food porn.

It’s a rote hatchet job, rehashing information that virtually everyone already knows, but at least it facilitates one of the year’s oddest and gutsiest performances.

Egoyan will not be getting an Oscar nomination for this picture. But after a long creative slump, he may have found a new calling.

The movie isn’t afraid to go to some dark places.

Viewers will be torn between admiring its laid-back naturalism and wishing it possessed just a little more oomph.

Anyone merely hoping for more gravity-defying fight sequences will be reasonably satisfied by Sword Of Destiny, which chugs along amiably enough and never goes very long without a skirmish of some sort.

Dialogue is witless (though at least there are no pop-culture references), and the kids are all generic types with pre-packaged personalities.

An opportunity to see the Sutherlands onscreen together — with Donald playing Kiefer’s disapproving preacher dad — is the only new thing that Forsaken has to offer. Whether that’s enough will vary according to taste.

The film is low-key and evenhanded to a fault, resisting opportunities for melodrama at every turn; it radiates intelligence and fairness, which, while admirable, don’t exactly inspire a strong emotional response.

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

One can make a creepy demonic horror movie, or one can make a sorrowful exposé about a real-world phenomenon that destroyed multiple families, but it’s exceedingly difficult to make both at the same time.

That Tumbledown sort of works in spite of all its clichés is a testament to the gifts of its two lead actors.

All Iceland all the time, and while it failed to snag a foreign-language Oscar nomination (after winning the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes last year), it does its country proud.

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

Lazer Team is carried along by the sheer enthusiasm of its main quartet....It’s just too bad that there’s less wit in the dialogue than there is in the Barenaked Ladies’ closing-credits song.

To the extent that the film has an emotional journey, it’s the story of this man’s very, very slight moral awakening, which achieves nothing whatsoever and doesn’t necessarily look as if it’s going to stick.

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.

On a moment-to-moment basis, A Perfect Day is reasonably engaging, mostly because of its novel milieu—there haven’t been many films about foreign aid workers, and Farías clearly amassed a wealth of anecdotes during her time with DWB. Trouble is, it plays like a collection of anecdotes.

Intruders ultimately comes across like basic-cable schlock (or is it Netflix schlock now?), slightly redeemed by the germ of a great idea, even if said idea never truly germinates.

Still, it’s dispiriting to see him (Nelson) produce something as turgid and heavy-handed as Anesthesia, which employs a dozen or so cardboard characters as mouthpieces for singularly unilluminating thoughts about the ways in which people struggle to bury their unhappiness.

Many will guess the resolution of Michael and Lisa’s affair well in advance. That scarcely matters, though, given how beautifully distinctive Anomalisa is from moment to moment.

Moore here makes his strongest bona fide argument in ages, albeit one that still gleefully stacks the deck and avoids examining possible downsides too carefully. He even comes across as genuinely patriotic, in his own way.

Both Rockwell and Clement are back for the latest Hess production, Don Verdean, which can’t even work up enough comic energy to be considered bad.

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.

Youth is slightly less garish and bombastic than his Italian pictures (which include The Great Beauty and Il Divo), but it’s no less free-associative, building meaning from juxtapositions that feel largely intuitive. If you’re on Sorrentino’s wavelength, that can feel liberating. If not, “oppressive” might be a better word.

We’re talking maximum sound and fury, and while no movie that stars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard could signify nothing, this one doesn’t signify a whole lot.

Poekel isn’t interested in something as mundane as a new romance. He’s basically trying to make Seasonal Affective Disorder: The Movie, and comes damn close to pulling it off. He has a tremendous ally in Audley, who gives one of the year’s best performances (albeit one destined to receive no awards and scant attention).

The first words spoken in Victor Frankenstein are “You know the story,” and anyone who simply mutters “Yep,” gets up, and heads back to the box office for a refund will be well ahead of the game.

Haynes has pulled off something remarkable here, without a trace of winking or archness. It’s been a long time since the movies have seen a fuse of pure ardor burn this slowly and steadily, leading to such an unexpectedly moving explosion of resolve.

The result, while less poetic and artful than Eugenides’ book or Coppola’s film, is much more emotionally direct, and pulls off a very tricky balancing act between bemoaning its characters’ fate and celebrating their resilience.

A compelling story might have succeeded in overcoming those cosmetic distractions, but Bettany only offers an overwrought romance.

Rather than aim for uproarious, it constantly settles for amusing.

Part of the problem is that Theeb, while running only 100 minutes, takes nearly an hour to set up its basic premise.

The sheer variety of humanity that Wiseman documents keeps the film lively, and he finds plenty of terrific subjects.

If the film fails to deliver wonders, it does offer substantial pleasures.

At long last, Nasty Baby decides what it wants to be: a complete mess.

Given the number of films nowadays that would be just as enjoyable with both sound and picture turned off, a superlative soundtrack is nothing to sneeze at.

The Russian Woodpecker is ostensibly an investigative documentary, but there’s precious little investigation; its primary subject, Fedor Alexandrovich, is peddling a hypothesis for which he offers no tangible evidence whatsoever.

The film bears the subtitle The Stanley Milgram Story, but it’s most effective when it strenuously avoids biopic conventions, focusing intently on the man’s controversial professional life.

Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.

For those attuned to Maddin’s goofy sense of humor, it’s easily the funniest movie he’s ever made—a series of several dozen comic shorts strung together on a ludicrous clothesline. The only downside is that the experience, at just shy of two hours, can be a trifle exhausting.

That sense of mystery definitely keeps Partisan intriguing, though it also creates expectations that Kleiman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sarah Cyngler, isn’t especially interested in fulfilling.

At its heart, The Martian is an unapologetically stirring celebration of our ability, as a species, to solve even the most daunting problems via rational thought, step by step by step. It’s basically "Human Ingenuity: The Movie."

Ultimately, what makes Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead valuable is the sense it provides of how savage and uncompromising the National Lampoon was in its heyday.

So long as the film focuses on that spiky rapport, and on the authentic, lived-in textures of the American Midwest, it’s thoroughly enjoyable. Unfortunately, the grittiness and weary pathos ultimately gives way to a disappointingly pat finale, undermining everything that came before.

The real problem is that Ozon can’t quite decide whether he’s making the crowd-pleasing tale of a cross-dresser’s empowerment or the thornier, more compelling tale of a woman who tries to recreate her dead best friend, "Vertigo"-style (and then sleep with her).

It’s an uncommonly bold gambit, expressly designed to frustrate people who want to see a strong woman deliver a righteous ass kicking. The progressivism here is instead rooted in futility and despair, which provides much more of a valuable shock to the system.

Breathe, the second feature directed by French actress Mélanie Laurent (best known for playing the vengeful Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), tackles the subject from a refreshingly novel angle, depicting a platonic friendship that quickly grows toxic.

It’s a less pointed and implicitly feminist work than such classics as "Raise The Red Lantern" and "The Story Of Qiu Ju" —one could even call it a shameless weepie. Still, it’s a welcome throwback to one of the most emotionally wrenching actor-director partnerships in film history.

Does a pretty good job at keeping the jokes wry and low-key, with just a few detours into broader, Will Ferrell-ish territory.

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.

There’s a rah-rah element to The Second Mother that undermines its sociological ambition.

Fans of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel will likely be appalled. Those unfamiliar with the cult classic, on the other hand, are more likely to scratch their heads in bewilderment, wondering how a yarn with such potential is so suddenly derailed.

Desplechin’s pictures can be as maddening as they are exhilarating, and the same is true of The Mend, which sometimes seems in danger of over dosing on its own stylistic flourishes. Nonetheless, it’s a hugely promising introduction to a director who’s just getting started.

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

People Places Things, though reportedly also based on Strouse’s own experience, plays like a mediocre, bloated sitcom episode — never novel or insightful, and only moderately funny.

How one responds to Meru will largely depend on whether its three subjects come across as heroically courageous or suicidally reckless.

Goldthwait stays behind the camera, but his long personal history with Crimmins provides him with access that no other filmmaker would likely have been able to get, given how ferociously the man guards his privacy.

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."

What primarily comes across is a film about squandered creativity that itself ignores and trivializes the creative process, pretending that child prodigies produce masterworks unconsciously, like a chicken laying eggs. That’s a poor lesson to impart.

Listen To Me Marlon suffers from an atrocious score that frequently sounds like it belongs in a useless Oscar montage, and it doesn’t reveal much about Brando that cinephiles don’t already know. But the man himself is endlessly fascinating, so it’s hard to fault a movie that ditches anything extraneous (especially talking-head testimonials) in order to let him tell his own story in his own words.

Its innocuous take on pregnancy is its most substantial flaw.

There’s just not enough meat on these bones, and what meat there is has been thoroughly chewed over. Authentic casting doesn’t guarantee anything.

Was there a pressing need for yet another rendition of this story? Should it come around again (and it likely will), a unique perspective on the events would be welcome.

For the most part, Tamhane improbably succeeds in creating a damning courtroom drama that derives much of its power from observing the cogs in the machinery when the machine is switched off.

What We Did On Our Holiday sets up a sturdy comic scenario and then proceeds to head in another direction altogether—one that’s nearly impossible to anticipate, making the film much more of a goofy delight than would have seemed likely at the outset.

It doesn’t help that Boulevard is a movie that feels at least a decade past its sell-by date, if not two.

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

Whatever one’s moral qualms regarding the Autodefensas—and Heineman makes a point of showing that Mireles, who’s married, has a penchant for using his celebrity to seduce much younger women—there’s no denying the engrossing nature of the footage shown here, or that the people involved are fighting for their own lives.

The film isn’t remotely funny or insightful enough to justify spending an hour and a half in such intensely disagreeable company.

There’s not much to Jackie & Ryan, which is what almost makes it something special.

The Little Death never feels remotely of a piece, and is likely to find its proper audience months from now when the individual sketches show up on YouTube.

The Princess Of France ambles from one low-key encounter to another, rarely engaging directly with the Bard, and never elevating its heart rate beyond the resting level.

Escobar: Paradise Lost employs this structure in a way that divides the movie neatly in half: one hour of tedious expository flashback followed by one hour of solidly exciting present-tense thriller action.

The ideas are admirably heady, and Phang, making just her second feature (after 2008’s little-seen Half-Life), demonstrates a sure hand with both her imaginative milieu and her cast.

Gabriel, the first feature written and directed by Lou Howe, gives Culkin an opportunity to demonstrate serious range, and he takes full advantage; if this film doesn’t ignite his career, it’ll only be because too few people see it.

Pacino has finally started acting again, which is cause for celebration. It’ll be real cause for celebration if/when he also starts picking projects worthier than The Humbling, Danny Collins, and now Manglehorn, all of which see him struggling to find moments of truth within a contrived, borderline ludicrous scenario.

The movie’s only real drawback is that its singleminded approach sometimes omits crucial information.

It’s an unusual but surprisingly effective mix of outrageousness and sincerity, in which the four anxious revelers somehow function both as broad caricatures and as real, complex human beings.

Given the wealth of possibilities, this doc’s superficial, exceedingly polite approach is a big disappointment.

It’s bracing to see Basinger take on something this dark, even if the darkness is empty.

Wasikowska gives a solid, emotionally precise performance, ably supported by the men around her (especially Ifans, who relishes Monsieur Lheureux’s unctuous cajolery), and the result is intelligent and eminently watchable.

In a way, their continued ability to prank government agencies and the media speaks to how little they’ve achieved over the years, which becomes this third film’s subject.

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.

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.

For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.

It’s a slow-motion horror movie founded on utter nonsense.

It’s hard to build a story entirely on grace notes, but Lafleur comes close.

Because there’s no real narrative — just the constant effort to score and survive, plus Harley’s dysfunctional on/off love affair with Ilya — Heaven Knows What doesn’t so much conclude as just stop, which is less than totally satisfying.

What it demonstrates most conclusively is that writer-director John Maclean, making his first feature after a career spent mostly as a musician (notably as a member of The Beta Band), knows how to tell a terrific yarn. Why he chose not to do so with the movie as a whole, then, is something of a mystery.

Without a hair-trigger renegade like Popeye Doyle or a long-awaited De Niro-Pacino showdown at its center, this procedural account, running well over two hours, takes on a certain plodding, obligatory vibe.

Most of Echoes Of War amounts to Hints Of Aggression, with the film struggling to find enough incident to reach feature length.

The whole movie is encased in air quotes, and its sole purpose, apart from that winking, is to argue that even artsy-fartsy grumps secretly identify with Hollywood wish-fulfillment. Would Guerschuny the film critic have liked The Film Critic? If so, he’s a soft touch.

The 100-Year-Old Man surely won’t conquer the U.S. box office, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a foreign film that isn’t deadly serious. We could use more subtitled belly laughs.

If 5 Flights Up is worth seeing, it’s primarily for the pleasure of Keaton and Freeman’s company, plus maybe for some tips on buying and selling an apartment.

It’s a mess, but it’s a commendable mess. Bonus points for ambition and nerve.

These characters are so richly drawn, and inhabit such a precise milieu, that they deserved a less perfunctory, anticlimactic fate. The truth will allegedly set us free, but it often puts filmmakers in chains.

Superficiality reigns here. Arguably, that should dominate a movie about a fashion designer. But fashion shows run 10-20 minutes, not two and a half hours.

It’s refreshing to see a prestige costume drama so interested in its heroine that it treats “happily ever after” as an afterthought.

A few dreamy interludes aside, the film’s tone is cool, dispassionate, and matter-of-fact. All that’s missing is a reason to give a damn.

The bold, arresting movie doesn’t really work, but is nonetheless almost impossible to stop watching.

The new ending Oelhoffen has dreamed up is unsatisfying—Camus’ version was sharper, nastier, more credible—and the film never strays far from genre convention, but it’s refreshing to see a sincere paean to nobility, honor, and courage, especially one that periodically elevates the pulse with expertly mounted standoffs.

Anyone who’s seen The Miracle Worker in any form will find Marie’s Story very familiar, and even perhaps a bit rote.

Nicolas Cage at least manages to bring the occasional jolt of electricity to disposable genre tripe like this. Travolta is practically comatose.

Despite strenuous efforts, 24 Days fails to make the case that Halimi would be alive now had the anti-Semitism of his abductors been properly recognized. And since that’s the film’s sole reason for existence, there’s not much else to say.

It can’t be faulted for its noble intentions. Like many an after-school special, however, it can be faulted in virtually every other department, including stilted performances, turgid dialogue, flat direction, and a general ignorance regarding human nature.

So doggedly ordinary that it constantly teeters on the edge of tedium.

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.

Caranfil, who’s made several previous features in Romanian, struggles throughout to find the right tone, mostly in vain. There’s no way to know whether he was hampered by the need to go international, but the film’s general lack of authenticity certainly doesn’t do it any favors.

Too blunt and didactic to convey the futility of war with the complexity the subject demands, Tangerines works primarily as a showcase for its trio of lead actors, who work hard to make their characters’ gradual yet quick thaw seem not just credible, but inevitable.

Very loosely inspired by Chopra’s 1989 feature "Parinda," this wan crime drama plays like the equivalent of a Hindi novel that’s been run through Google Translate. Everything feels rudimentary and slightly awkward, though it’s possible to discern how the material might once have been powerful.

Consequently, it’s primarily of interest to longtime fans, or to those who think they might become fans and want to take this opportunity to start at the beginning. If nothing else, this is a rare case in which a director’s feature debut doubles as his greatest-hits album. To watch it is to simultaneously see where Tsai Ming-liang came from and precisely where he was headed.

Kill Me Three Times is reasonably absorbing while it’s in progress, if only because it succeeds in inspiring curiosity about where it’s headed, but the finale is such a blood-soaked shrugfest that it retroactively makes everything that preceded it feel like a waste of time.

The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.

It’s a movie to be mildly enjoyed and then left behind — apropos, given the subject matter.

Thompson makes Ruskin such a cardboard villain, playing on stereotypes of the cold, stuffy intellectual, that she turns Gray’s story into a tastefully dreary domestic-prison saga.

Consequently, anyone coming to Ned Rifle cold will be bewildered. But there are numerous pleasures for the initiated, from Ryan’s continuing dissolute mellifluence as Henry Fool to Simon’s rebirth as a terrible stand-up comic constantly monitoring the comments on his blog.

Plympton manages to keep it lively with one stunningly kinetic setpiece after another, many of which could easily be airlifted out of the picture to function as stand-alone shorts.

The film is mostly one long stalling tactic, indulging in unreliable flashbacks and narrative wheel-spinning to expand the details of its tragic scenario to feature-length. When it finally gets to what happened, though, prepare to cringe.

This feels more like porn than any solo feature Clark has ever made, in part because his non-pro cast is unusually wooden even by his standards.

Boys will be boys and wealthy a--holes will be wealthy a--holes in The Riot Club, an alleged cautionary tale that revels in bad behavior for nearly two hours before finally offering up a stern “tsk, tsk, tsk.” Unlike the great gangster and outlaw movies, however, this unpleasant, moralistic film doesn’t succeed in making transgression look cathartically appealing.

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

Part of what made Edgar Wright’s "The World’s End" so refreshing was the way that it feinted at being a certain tired sort of movie before suddenly making a wild leap in another direction. Growing Up And Other Lies, is exactly the mediocre movie that The World’s End was pretending to be.

Marquardt hasn’t thought of a unique take on this predictable scenario, she’s merely done an expert job of disguising it. Still, the first half does function as a impressive showcase for her formal chops, as well as for Bloom’s gorgeously empathetic performance.

Ultimately, despite Kikuchi’s expressively dour performance and David Zellner’s formal invention... Kumiko feels like a collection of amusing and/or depressing riffs stitched together within a context that barely matters.

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.

Katherine Heigl has exactly one funny moment in the dire black comedy Home Sweet Hell, which is still one more than anybody else has.

The biggest problem with Seymour, though, is that Hawke can’t quite find a structure or rhythm for the movie as a whole. It’s only 81 minutes long, and never remotely boring, but the feeling that it’s due to end at any moment kicks in around the midpoint and persists right up until it actually does end, like the documentary equivalent of "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King."

Almereyda’s sweeping cuts take material that was already problematic (though this technically isn’t one of Shakespeare's “problem plays”) and render it almost nonsensical.

Suspense can be riveting, but 3 Hearts really needed to deploy its bomb much earlier. When it does goes off, it’s a dud.

October Gale plays like an adaptation of a quick outline for a romantic thriller, rushed into production before anyone got around to actually writing the screenplay and fleshing things out.

It’s just that the quality of Williams’ script varies wildly, from superb to dire.

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.

There’s a sentimental streak to These Final Hours, but in the end (heh), it feels as if it’s been earned.

Earnestly well-intentioned and doggedly uncommercial, this is the kind of film that’s worth rooting for in principle, but a solid cast and evocative 35 mm photography can’t compensate for its slightly stultifying familiarity.

The setting may be Belfast ’71, but Demange’s sensibility — first-rate suspense coupled with black-and-white politics — is much more James Cameron ’86.

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

The images are gorgeous, but they’re gorgeous in a void; unlike in The Silver Cliff, the intended connection to the people who inhabit them is missing. Possibly Aïnouz let autobiographical impulses lead him astray. Or maybe he’s an avant-garde filmmaker at heart.

Nothing even remotely wild touches this generic indie movie, which embraces every imaginable cliché in depicting the emotional travails of a sensitive kid in mourning. There isn’t a wolf in it, nor a fox, nor a hog, nor much of anything else. Maybe a chicken.

As a sequel, Queen & Country doesn’t work at all, primarily because Boorman waited far too long.

Ultimately, Digging Up The Marrow is more of an affectionate comedy than a horror movie, despite a third act that features some tense moments and hostile critters.

Accidental Love isn’t very good—and might never have been very good, judging from the general air of desperation—but much of it is identifiably Russell’s work, and its scattered best moments recall Huckabees’ inspired loopiness.

In the end, despite its quirky twists on the genre, Wyrmwood is just another zombie flick, riffing on its predecessors and hoping that’ll suffice. It needed more creativity. Or more passion. Both, maybe?

The result is more often amusing than gut-busting, but it doesn’t wear out its welcome, and that’s fairly impressive in itself.

Come third-act time, however, Enter The Dangerous Mind goes straight into the toilet, transforming into Jim: Portrait Of A Schizophrenic Serial Killer.

On the plus side, Collins (Mirror Mirror, The Blind Side) and Claflin (Finnick Odair in the Hunger Games franchise) are both appealing enough, even if their chemistry makes Rosie and Alex’s we’re-just-pals stance appear even more ludicrous than intended.

At its best, Losing Ground suggests a wobbly filmmaker who was robbed of the chance to steady herself. At its worst, it’s still a fascinating time capsule.

Both Water Lilies and Tomboy explored similar material—fluctuating sexual/gender identity and adolescent heartbreak—but Sciamma’s touch is lighter and more nuanced in Girlhood, which refuses to pin any of its characters down, even in their vacillations.

Unfortunately, this promising material turns out to be merely the setup for a thoroughly generic action flick in which a gang of thieves without much honor attempt to pull off one last big heist. In the long, dispiriting slide to mediocrity thereafter, McGregor largely relapses into cute-rascal mode.

There’s something icky about a life-threatening coma that serves no function except to engineer a meet-cute.

At its core, this is one of the most incisive, penetrating, and empathetic films ever made about what it truly means to love another person, audaciously disguised as salacious midnight-movie fare. No better picture is likely to surface all year.

For every element that doesn’t work...there’s a moment that crackles with electricity and conviction.

Set and shot in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, this earnest, well-intentioned melodrama creates a number of potentially compelling figures, only to shove them into contrived corners that undermine the film’s sense of authenticity. It’s as if The Sweet Hereafter had been infected by Babel.

Drama is driven by conflict, but in this particular case it’s the calm between the storms that captivates.

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.

Marsan does his best to convey his character’s essential decency, but he’s hamstrung by Pasolini’s insistence on underscoring the emptiness of John’s existence at every opportunity.

At times, Porumboiu’s mix of repetition and resignation recalls Samuel Beckett, and if the overall result is more of a clever exercise than a proper movie, it’ll still have some dryly amusing appeal for those who appreciate intellectual absurdism.

[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.

For all three hours and change, it’s never less than interesting, but it’s also never much more than interesting.

There are a couple of exciting set pieces, including a superb chase sequence in which Abel pursues one of the hijackers along some train tracks, but A Most Violent Year is primarily interested in detailing the ways in which moral gray areas inevitably shade into true darkness.

In his three previous films (The Return, The Banishment, Elena), Zvyagintsev frequently pushed past sober into dour, leaning too heavily on a characteristically Soviet sense of gloom and doom... Leviathan is another downer, but it’s considerably looser and livelier than its predecessors, verging at times on black comedy.

It’s a film that captures humanity at its best and its worst, sometimes simultaneously.

Epics tend to get extra respect — bonus points for ambition, one might say — and while Ceylan’s film is a decidedly intimate example of the genre, it was clearly perceived, in advance, as an important work just by virtue of its sheer heft.

It’s a magnificently acrid showcase for two idiosyncratic actors who seem uncannily in tune with each other, even as their characters are out of sync.

Little Feet barely even qualifies as slight. It’s more of a limbering exercise for its director than a full-fledged project, and it’s overly reliant on his offspring’s minor charms.

Confirms director and co-screenwriter Serge Bozon as one of French cinema’s true oddballs.

If it merits no other superlative, Mommy is unquestionably the most hyperactive movie of the year. It begins at a fever pitch and maintains that degree of in-your-face intensity for well over two hours, to either exhilarating or exhausting effect, depending on one’s tolerance level.

What’s most frustrating about The Captive is that it includes all the elements for a potentially great Egoyan movie—they’re just buried in the mountain of schlock.

The only thing worse than useless trash is useless trash with delusions of grandeur.

With no compelling characters in sight, and a director whose formal acumen begins and ends with forbidding locations (in this case, underwater), Pioneer has to lean on its drab story.

People tend to equate great acting with demonstrative emoting, but knowing when not to telegraph what a character is feeling is just as crucial. Sometimes, walking from point A to point Z — simply, without fuss — is all that’s required.

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.

The Imitation Game is at its best when it focuses on the collision between cryptography and proto-programming. (No individual can truly be said to have invented the computer, but Turing comes close.)

The result is predictably, frustratingly bloated and meandering, even as the short’s charms remain largely intact.

The film’s biggest drawback is its essentially passive nature, which prevents it from ever building to a crescendo.

Happy Valley’s interviews with figures directly related to the case—Paterno’s widow and sons; Sandusky’s adopted stepson, who suddenly declared himself another of Sandusky’s victims toward the end of the trial, after having previously denied having been abused—shed no light on the subject whatsoever, coming across like an obligatory waste of time.

Bad Hair can best be described as expertly depressing—a subcategory of art cinema that seems worth the punishment only when the gloom is counterbalanced by at least a few transcendent moments. No such moments ever surface here, however, apart from a brief fantasy during the closing credits.

There’s absolutely nothing new or innovative to be found here, but sometimes it can be almost comforting to watch a movie do an unironic tour of the classics.

Had the film not been so open about its ambition, maybe its mediocrity wouldn’t seem quite so galling.

What makes Miss Meadows egregiously awful is that it has no perspective whatsoever on vigilante justice. As an ostensible work of satire, it lacks bite, never truly questioning or complicating its heroine’s actions; the film isn’t even outrageous enough to be appalling (which paradoxically makes it appalling).

Spelling everything out is never recommended, but for a horror movie, in particular, it’s death.

There’s a wishy-washiness to the film’s ideological bent that keeps steering things in a more conventional direction, as if Jones (or perhaps Glendon Swarthout, who wrote the source novel) were afraid to take this risky material all the way. It’s a decidedly bumpy ride to an odd destination.

Unfortunately, Penance is an example of a TV movie that definitely belongs on the small screen, to be watched piecemeal over the course of several days. Consumed in one gigantic, four-and-a-half-hour gulp, it becomes painfully repetitive and monotonous.

As an impression of a Terrence Malick film, The Better Angels is technically faultless, unimprovable. All that’s missing is the soul.

What keeps 21 Years from feeling roughly that long, in addition to the clips (fun fact: Before Sunset’s ending can inspire tears even when shown out of context, with talking heads chattering over the dialogue), is the occasional offbeat moment during interviews.

Unlike Wiseman’s greatest films, National Gallery never quite finds an overarching theme. There’s a fair amount of material regarding the art/commerce divide, but many scenes have no bearing whatsoever on that subject, and the film generally lacks urgency.

Hit By Lightning might have worked as black comedy, but Blitt clearly lacks any instinct for genuine darkness.

While the film runs only 77 minutes, that’s a good half an hour longer than the material can support, even though Workman shot it over roughly a decade.

Nightcrawler is a portrait of an amoral opportunist who stumbles upon his horrible calling, and the film’s chief pleasure is watching Gyllenhaal portray what it might be like if Rushmore’s Max Fischer grew up to become Chuck Tatum, the unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s scabrous Ace In The Hole. It’s adolescent solipsism gone grotesquely rancid.

It does put a human face on the suffering of those who lost jobs and/or loved ones, which has some value, but anyone hoping for a more nuanced take than “corporations are bad and regular folks are good” will be disappointed.

Most of the pleasure in Green Dragons comes simply from the opportunity to watch some underused actors dig into meatier parts than they’re usually offered.

White Bird In A Blizzard, is another literary adaptation, gunning for respectability. It’s the most mainstream and accessible picture he’s (Araki) ever made, but this time his pendulum swung a bit too far in that direction.

Fanning and Hawkes are both great actors, but they can only do so much with Low Down’s familiar, monotonous cycle of recovery and relapse.

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.

Housebound, a horror comedy from New Zealand, tries another tack: Its protagonist doesn’t leave because she legally can’t. The movie doesn’t get nearly as much mileage from this concept as it might have, getting bogged down in an increasingly silly plot having nothing to do with house arrest, but the premise does at least justify a hilariously antisocial leading lady.

Unfortunately, Edgerton the writer creates a situation so thorny that he can’t find a way out of it.

Young Ones looks promising in the early going, when it’s relying on Shannon’s customary intensity and building its harsh, arid world. (Principal photography took place in South Africa.) Shannon quickly disappears, though, and that’s when the dreary plot kicks in.

A credulity-straining duet between two fine actors.

The first Dead Snow included a salute to the classic Sam Raimi gearing-up montage, with its quick cuts and abrupt zooms; it was a cute nod, but nothing more. Red Vs. Dead does the same thing, but concludes the montage with a long, static shot of the Zombie Squad watching as the cash register at the hardware store churns out an endless receipt for all the tools they’ve purchased. That’s an actual joke, which is what the first movie lacked.

Automata approximates the look and feel of idea-driven science fiction, but it doesn’t have any actual ideas. That future looks bleak.

The film fictionalizes his life story so aggressively that it’s no less (or more) entertaining than the average rom-com.

It’s an equally fiery, magnetic star turn, but being trapped in a stolid, unimaginative, and simplistic example of the genre — a typical historical biopic, in other words — saps a surprising amount of its strength.

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.

While many of the individual storylines are ludicrously melodramatic, building toward emotional meltdowns (and one suicide attempt), it’s the cumulative fear and loathing of everything digital that crosses the line into absurdity.

Good People might have been better titled "Dumb People", or at least "People Who Have Never Seen A Movie In Their Entire Lives."

Apparently struggling to please two very different audiences at once, Horovitz seems to have little control over the material, ultimately wrapping things up with a neat little bow that makes a mockery of the preceding ugliness.

Seeing two idiosyncratic actors like Tipton and Teller wasted on such generic material is dispiriting. Just a little acknowledgement of the real world, especially vis-à-vis online hookups, would have been welcome.

Within the limitation of their roles, all the actors do solid work... but the movie’s tone is doggedly, almost noxiously sincere, verging on downright moist.

This Is Where I Leave You struggles in vain to meld broad, farcical comedy with low-key, contemplative drama. It lurches so violently between its twin modes, in fact, that it’s a wonder the actors are able to remain standing upright.

If only this imaginative environment were populated with a single compelling character or stimulating idea, rather than serving as busy distraction from the narrative tedium.

Like most self-conscious attempts at a “midnight movie,” Tusk lacks the conviction that would make it anything more than an outré curiosity; it’s essentially a filmed dare, combined with fan service.

No matter how much this story has been streamlined for accessibility’s sake, its import remains potent. In spite of numerous missteps, Pride gets that across.

It’s also just magnificently goofy, unafraid to court ridicule and confident enough to take captivating detours.

Janiak handles both horror and drama ably enough to suggest that she’d excel at either genre. She hasn’t yet mastered the combination, but it’s only her first try. Give her time.

The Green Prince relates gripping events in a doggedly subdued manner, via direct-to-camera interviews and dramatic re-creations.

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.

Aggressively derivative though The Longest Week is, however, it’s clearly the work not of a lazy thief, but of a raw talent who’s still struggling to find his own voice. In the meantime, his impressions are pretty darn impressive.

It’s not a documentary that reinvents the form or will alter anyone’s perception of the war, but sometimes a rich, exhaustive chronicle is more than enough.

Kelly & Cal is worth seeing, if only because it gives Lewis her first truly meaty role in years.

Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling.

Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer, Quinceañera) do their best to avoid sensationalism, but age difference and statutory rape are the only factors that make the story remotely interesting.

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.

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.

Writer-director Catherine Breillat who adapted the film from her own roman à clef, seems content to let the story stand on its own two feet, as if it were something that she’d invented from whole cloth rather than experienced. It’s a laudable approach, in theory, but it backfires a bit in this particular instance, because what occurs is so psychologically inexplicable that Breillat’s alter ego comes across as terminally foolish.

May In The Summer just never distinguishes itself in any way that isn’t superficial.

In the end, it’s Salvo itself that’s murky and obscure.

It works reasonably well as a film, too, though, provided that one isn’t overly bothered by repetition and a general sense of diminishing returns.

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

There isn’t much to it, really, but a little truth and loveliness is always welcome.