Nathan Rabin

It isn’t a terribly intimate portrait of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, or Nixon, but it is revealing in its own right, as a fascinatingly warped and aged Polaroid of an epic life that’s grown more compelling with the passage of time.

The film overflows with inspired comic ideas that fizzle and die in execution like a marathon fireworks display of nothing but duds.

Ford and Oldman’s scenes together are Paranoia’s sole redeeming facet.

It’s bloated, overwrought, and nakedly sentimental, a sappy and cliched celebration instead of a searching and incisive exploration.

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

Lovelace finds a fresh take on familiar material, but the film is also distinguished by its focus and intensity.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

It deserves credit for avoiding the conventions of romantic comedies and defying audience expectations, but only to a degree. Instead of hitting the expected notes and beats, Drinking Buddies instead ambles sideways. It’s headed nowhere in particular, but at least the voyage is pleasant.

A film that grows less compelling and original by the minute, R.I.P.D. serves due notice that the mismatched-buddy-cop movie is wearing out its welcome all over again.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

After an unpromising beginning, Iceberg Slim develops into a thorny, engaging exploration of the strange twilight and late-in-life fame of a bona fide American outlaw.

The film is so slight that it feels less like a proper sequel to Grown Ups than a failed television spin-off that inexplicably cast Sandler and the gang in the lead roles instead of their low-budget television equivalents.

It’s a soul-stirring tribute to a man whose vision was too bold and revolutionary for his lifetime, or the convention-bound ways of the music industry, but was ultimately too powerful to be denied.

White House Down is never more than a sliver away from gleeful self-parody. It’s pure patriotic kitsch, the cinematic equivalent of a black-velvet painting of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons as it soars majestically over Mount Rushmore.

The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

It’s almost impressive how the moronic new ensemble comedy The Big Wedding manages to cram three hours’ worth of nonsensical subplots, extraneous characters, and implausible plot points into 90 minutes of streamlined idiocy.

Like "Upstream Color," Sun Don’t Shine owes a sizable debt to the philosophical lyricism of Terrence Malick. Working wonders on a tight budget, Seimetz uses handheld cameras and tight compositions to create an air of claustrophobic intensity interspersed with moments of ragged beauty.

Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.

The film never even attempts to peer behind the curtain of Jay’s colorful existence; it’s content that the show in front of it is spectacle enough. But Deceptive Practices would be a richer, deeper experience if the filmmakers had penetrated Jay’s fierce boundaries even a little.

Scary Movie 5 aspires to timeliness, but its comic sensibility is so groaningly retro that the film features a series of tributes to The Benny Hill Show and its signature ditty, “Yakety Sax.”

It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.

The result feels like cinematic health food: vaguely good for you but less than delicious.

It isn’t until Temptation grows flamboyantly bad in its final act that it rises to the level of good dumb fun in the trashy tradition of Perry’s most entertainingly awful films.

Few actors are as riveting doing absolutely nothing, and The Place Beyond The Pines perfectly typecasts Gosling as a noir staple: the decent but rudderless drifter driven to violent and desperate action.

Admission ultimately can’t quite figure out what kind of a film it wants to be, so like a lot of promising but unfocused contenders, it never quite lives up to its potential. But there’s value to be found in its meandering.

The emotions of soul music are irresistibly universal. The same is true of soul-music clichés. Based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the tale of four ambitious young Aboriginal girls from Australia who come of age performing before American serviceman in 1968 Vietnam. And yet the film is afflicted by a curious lack of cultural specificity.