Nick Allen

Salt and Fire is fundamentally bad, in its filmmaking and expressiveness, whether there is any meaning to a parrot quoting Nostradamus or not.

Only worthwhile storytellers could take an elevator pitch like this one (the last two people on Earth) and produce long-lasting curiosity about its inherent beauty and horror.

As for Paxton, he enters the story with an edge, establishing the authority and revealing sensitivity of a single father with a powerful job. It’s not a career-topping role by any means but it is a reminder of how the late actor could take on a role with sincerity and breathe some type of life into it.

While Suntan is more than just a tale about an older man becoming involved with a younger woman, it's unfortunately not as profound when it later claims to be a statement on the movie you think you're watching.

In the true spirit of this profoundly uninteresting movie, Donald Cried can only shrug through its central notion that men will be sad boys.

Hand-in-hand with its bleeding-heart nature, Collide has the ballsy idea of making a serious action movie about a fool in love, but that just becomes one of its many bungled stunts.

Betsy Brandt gives a compelling performance as the title character whose spirit is slowly breaking, a woman of the arts faced with a painful and personal manifestation of ambiguity.

Though it boasts a large scope with its ensemble cast, huge sequences and the star power of the almighty Jackie Chan, Railroad Tigers lacks the vital focus to come together.

Devon Terrell's performance as Barry is warming, always leading with empathy and a genuine smile, contemplative whenever not sharing his thoughts.

With a documentary as flabby but well-meaning as Best and Most Beautiful Things, you have to savor the small stuff.

Blood on the Mountain is wide-ranging across time, driven by talking heads and select footage, but it nails the human element at its core.

The big problem throughout Uncle Kent 2 is that while it can offer some amusement, it all feels like an inside joke.

Foiled by a weak imagination and clear limits to its awareness, Rainbow Time doesn’t become the strong feminist statement it ultimately wants to be.

That the story is never scary is the least of its problems.

For all of the film's ideas of art and entertainment, it might just forever change your preconceptions of the firework.

Kevin Pollak's raunchy comedy The Late Bloomer is merely cheesy and horny, but rarely amusing.

Long Way North is a different vision, using clear-defined colors, shapes and shadows for hand-drawn beauty, giving the film a bold, intricately-cut-construction-paper look. Especially as the characters are surrounded by ice and cold, the stark white images prove simple yet expressive.

At least with its wide scope, Maya Angelou and Still I Rise shows that her time on Earth was about more than being an author, poet, civil rights activist, a mother, a dancer, a singer, a film director, producer, journalist and much more. Her life was poetry itself.

While empathy is first to go in the tasteless When the Bough Breaks, there is nothing good in its place.

Its story is as common as sunlight, but the entertainment can be just as warm.

Though it too readily compares to other intimate observations on life-changing connections, you could place this take by director Maïwenn somewhere between Ingmar Bergman’s masterful “Scenes from a Marriage” and Derek Cianfrance’s searing “Blue Valentine,” while never being able to forget My King's two brilliant performances from Emmanuelle Bercot and Vincent Cassel.

Burman's film languishes on the chaos of the events, and it can never be accused of not having some ideas about fatherhood and legacy. But the humor of this rambling film runs dry to the point of unpalatable.

Tallulah is an impressive debut from Heder, who also works as a writer on Netlfix’s “Orange Is the New Black” (Uzo Aduba, who plays Crazy Eyes on the series, has a part as a child services agent with a lot of perspective).

It's more fulfilling to the soul than appetite, but the indulgence — if not the brief escape — is an inestimable perk.

A movie hopped up on the period piece sadism within Tarantino’s regurgitation cinema, Outlaws & Angels gravely mistakes Tarantino’s audaciousness for its own originality.

Owing some of its charms to other sex comedies from that decade, this Sundance 2016 title (now playing on Netflix) proves to be more layered than its promises of shenanigans may expect, especially as this is the rare sex comedy that doesn’t glorify the male gaze.

While Gondry calms his creative instincts to toy with the ordinary, he indirectly errs on making Microbe and Gasoline his first forgettable film.