Nick Schager

Despite occasional lapses into showy expressionistic slo-mo, Guerrero's direction demonstrates a patience and attention to emotional detail that allows the two young leads' performances to develop naturally.

With both hostility and compassion, the damaged duo slowly come to understand themselves and their respective pain-a familiar path that's energized by subtle lead performances, a tactile sense of place and surprising insight into the way people connect as they help each other heal.

The film would be a routine affair if not for its baroque aesthetic gestures and a captivating turn from star Abbie Cornish.

A young boy's nonchalant attitude toward having a friend stick a loaded gun in his mouth as well as a man's numerous knife scars courtesy of his beloved wife definitely cut through the clichés about "thug life" to capture how violence is an integral, corrosive part of inner-city life.

By consigning its most interesting character to a supporting role, this amiable slice of fictionalized history loses a good deal of its heft. Nonetheless, solid direction and a charming Berkeley turn help it stave off insubstantiality.

For all its avenues of inquiry, however, it never quite gels into more than a collection of tantalizing but unfounded theories.

To his credit, even as his material begins spiraling into less amusing territory, Lund alleviates the growing gloom with goofball levity.

A stately affair that’s never particularly intellectually incisive or revealing, and its stolid execution fails to transcend the material’s inherent staginess.

Set to Tom Holkenborg’s bombastic score, Gregorian chanting, and endless pew-pew-pews, Rebel Moon—Part Two: The Scargiver roars and rampages, yet its drama can’t match its aesthetic pomposity.

Hits many of the right feel-good notes. Unfortunately, it also strikes a lot of discordant ones, neutering most of its attempts at rousing inspiration.

Crowther’s courage and sacrifice deserves lionization, and comes shining through in Man with Red Bandana, but there’s no shaking the feeling that he also merits a more elegant cinematic celebration.

Cassel is never less than transfixing as a savior with a semi-sinister smile, but Partisan's lack of interest in providing necessary context — especially about the ill-defined larger society that Gregori rejects — leaves it operating on a hazy psychological level.

The cautionary tale is a familiar one. But it’s told with enough flashy verve and humor, along with a gossipy bombshell audio recording, to play as a breezy non-fiction look back at a phenom that had its 15 minutes—or, at least, enough time to get through an evening’s worth of quiz questions—in the smartphone spotlight.

The fictional filmmaker's rejection of "quirkiness" ends up, ironically, being embraced by the movie itself, but even at its most sitcomish, Karpovsky and Lowe's banter has a contentious authenticity that recognizes these industry grunts as vital and three-dimensional-no matter their nominal supporting status.

A cinematic doodle whose lack of ambition is both its most charming characteristic and its most limiting one, Pictures Of Superheroes operates in an absurdist universe where everything is abstracted in the silliest ways possible.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.

It builds to revelations that speak emphatically to social shallowness, pressures and prejudices—even if, in the end, its bombshells resonate as less surprising than inevitable.

Rehashing clichés with formal polish but little novelty, this oater is a dour affair made all the grimmer by the fact that there isn’t a second of its 139 minutes that isn’t colored, in some way, by the on-set shooting that made it notable, and notorious, in the first place.

Detailing the eight-month build-up to the show’s debut, First Monday in May is most compelling when simply taking up residence alongside Bolton, Wintour and Wong as they oversee the myriad aspects of their production.

Modest and affecting, it’s a portrait of the possibility of finding peace, contentment and self through both music and spirituality.

Never coherently articulates (or draws connections between) its various concerns, proving a handsomely horrific vampire bloodbath that, ahem, bites off more than it can chew.

The underwhelming result is similar to its signature beasts: a handsome clone that serves no purpose except to line its creators’ pockets.

The Devil on Trial still allows David and others to argue that demonic possession did take place, but given the evidence on display, many will likely find that up for considerable debate.

A cautionary tale about…making “a pact with the devil.” However, Milli Vanilli doesn’t have much to reveal that isn’t by now well-known pop lore.

Though two late plot developments are borderline-contrived, Green's direction is marked by mature dramatic and aesthetic understatement.

Overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness.

After establishing a central parent-child relationship rife with wacko biblical undertones, the director finds nowhere to take his story except into standard vengeance territory.

Director Prachya Pinkaew's hectic editing and breakneck pacing turns the action spastic, and his lack of interest in anything approaching coherent drama renders the proceedings one long showcase for its lead's Muay Thai combat skills. Luckily, those are considerable.

Beautiful slo-mo, up-close-and-personal cinematography abounds, as does an aggravating desire to turn its many subjects (and their plights to survive) into reflections of mankind.

Cribbing from countless Tinseltown efforts, this music-video-cum-perfume-ad is awash in excessively melodramatic flashbacks, car chases and references to the domestic illegal-immigration debate.

Etziony and Hanuka's on-the-fly footage suggests that DIRT's desire to help in Haiti was noble, but that its success in making a difference was minimal at best — thus leaving the film feeling primarily like a critical snapshot of how dysfunctional Western humanitarians often use overseas crises for their own ends.

Anderson utilizes slow-motion 3-D to hyperbolic effect while again casting Jovovich as the epitome of badass sexiness.

A lively saga about a young coding wizard who’s charged with saving his family’s gaming business, this celebration of old- and new-school creativity doesn’t break novel ground in any respect. Fortunately, though, its good humor, spry pacing and likable performances should appeal to its pre-high-school target audience.

A rehash that—in the interest of staving off franchise death for a little while longer—could stand to learn a few new tricks.

Waltrip’s earnest and forthright narration lends Blink of an Eye its intimacy and insight.

While The God Committee routinely resides on the precipice of preachiness, Stark’s script (via St. Germain’s source material) avoids one-note sermonizing and characterizations at most turns, instead maturely investigating the messy intersection of medicine, morality and commerce.

The film thrives thanks to its superb lead performances, with Sparks exuding an endearingly off-kilter earnestness that nicely contrasts with Ireland’s internalized phobic fears and self-doubt.

An aggressively fine intergalactic adventure whose earnest optimism and sweetness flirts—faithfully and dully—with hokiness.

The result is a work that radiates a boozy, Bukowski-esque downward spiral, all alcohol-fueled anger and aimless sadness.

A narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.

Such tension ultimately unravels during a latter half that rushes through too many underwhelming revelations, but that’s not enough to completely offset the film’s beguiling air of despondency.

The burgeoning relationship between both the athletes, bonding over a kindred "otherness," is handled tastefully by director Kaspar Heidelbach, though the lack of new insights on the subject of National Socialism's wickedness ultimately reduces a well-staged film to a historical footnote.

Unfortunately, as with so many social-survey documentaries, the film’s macro view comes at the expense of any microcosmic depth.

It won’t revolutionize the genre, and in fact would have benefited from considerable additional polish, but it’s just cute enough to warrant two hours of Netflix subscribers’ time.

A documentary saga of heartbreaking concentration-camp horrors, Inside Hana's Suitcase attempts to preserve Holocaust memories through frustratingly fractured means.

A beat-‘em-up whose competent fight sequences are ultimately overshadowed by its unintentional humor.

A pleasant and well-acted curio, and little more.

Bluff's portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that's only compromised by some obviously staged incidents.

Her documentary sporadically locates profound truth amid its myriad musings about the momentous and the everyday. Often, however, Anderson's hushed-tone articulations of her thoughts on these subjects prove affected, and her stream-of-consciousness style, though acutely constructed, is more alienating than inviting.

Intriguing without ever proving insightful, the film nonetheless has a formal patience and meticulousness that sets it apart from its jump-scare-loving mainstream-horror brethren.

When it comes to its central legal struggle, though, it leaves out so many crucial details that it cuts itself off at the knees.

No matter its cinematic derivativeness, Stink!’s outcry against continuing to use the American citizenry as chemistry experiment guinea pigs carries with it the unassailable whiff of common sense.

Goes heavy on convincing musical performances to make up for the fact that it has nothing astute to say about its subject—in large part because it doesn’t seem to really know him.

Alterman's camerawork, panning and zooming about Christiaan's ants, rabbits, birds, and other assorted mecha creatures, conveys a sense of ominous religious awe.

Despite a strong sense of its characters, however, Kelly rarely generates much melodramatic or amusing momentum.

The proceedings, no matter how logical their contentions, come off as merely one side of the debate.

Too much of Realm of Satan comes off as unreasonably poe-faced, which not only neuters the proceedings’ sense of giddy transgression but feels at odds with these characters’ comical bizarreness.

Little more than a creaky lark that fails to generate consistent laughs, even if it proves that John Cena is a charming goof-off who’s game for anything.

The Best and the Brightest's sharp one-liners and strong cast, especially McDonald's gleefully lecherous performance as an unabashed Republican pervert, help make it a sturdy bit of subculture-tweaking silliness.

An overall lack of adventurousness negates any genuine sense of surprise, but credit this Indian-themed indie for spicing up a familiar and routine dish with reasonably tasty flavor.

Boasts the idiosyncratic anxiety, depression, and angst of its author’s work and the bouncy tone and matching visual style of every other recent cinematic kid’s fable—two flavors that, it turns out, don’t really go well together.

Director Leanne Pooley's documentary on the sisters and their "anarchist variety act" is definitely a formulaic bit of portraiture, but given its engaging, pioneering subjects, gimmickry is hardly needed to spice things up.

The film’s lack of a traditional narrative will no doubt alienate many, but for the more adventurous, it offers a uniquely weird take on loneliness and lunacy.

Has its heart in the right place but little else, starting out competently and then slowly falling apart with each clumsy step along its "Game of Thrones"-lite path.

The director's righteous anger is less restrained than his conventional vérité aesthetics and less off-putting than his one-sided approach to the issues at hand - an advocacy for alternative wind-turbine energy is suspiciously sketchy - yet he smartly allows coal-exploiting bigwigs plenty of screen time to properly hang themselves.

Despite winning the Best Actress (for its female ensemble) and Jury Prize awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a bold gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.

A surface-level portrait about a scientific advancement that could change the world for the better or the worse, and a man who knows how to wield it but can’t necessarily be trusted to do so.

The aesthetic devices used by the directors to embellish their material — including educational and archival videos, split-screens, slow-motion, time-lapse footage, and lingering close-ups of needles and money — are a bit too self-consciously stylish for their own good. Nonetheless, their film captures the recurring nightmare of substance abuse.

Though stirringly headlined by Kate Winslet, it’s a by-the-books affair in almost every respect.

A gonzo, if somewhat gimmicky, approach to advocating healthy living; it's like Super Size Me in reverse.

Thompson assembles his footage with an expert's touch, but what his film lacks is its own perspective on these atrocities.

Despite attractive aesthetics, its fights grow wearisome, especially as the material crosses the two-hour mark and, in the process, zooms past multiple potential endings.

Don Cheadle flails about trying to channel the spirit of late jazz-trumpeting legend Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, a biopic that rejects typical genre conventions to the point of chasing itself down lame, tangential paths.

No matter a committed performance (two, actually) from Robert Pattinson, it’s an original that plays like a rehash—and an underwhelmingly unfunny one at that.

While that mood is ultimately a bit too monotonous to be completely persuasive, a strong cast convincingly captures the many ways in which adulthood proves far more complicated than what's imagined at 18.

The director's DV cinematography can be rough and ungainly, but it provides sterling glimpses of both family intimacy and its larger social context.

Even at 78 minutes, White Wash pads its material through repetition but remains a proficient portrait of how increased social, economic, and geographic opportunity fosters diversity - in life and out on the waves.

A colorful and cheery fantasy that duplicates its series predecessors’ cutesy humor and feel-good message making.

You can cut-and-paste all your adolescent obsessions into a giant collage (and recruit Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn to participate in the madness), but that doesn’t mean it’ll amount to more than a messy, insubstantial grab bag of your favorite things.

A rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

The horror film of 2017 is AlphaGo, a documentary about an artificial intelligence program designed to play Go – the oldest and most complex board game in the world – that feels like it’s sounding the alarm for the human race’s impending extinction.

Park's methodical but tonally uneven direction too often eschews luridness; it's as if he can't decide exactly how far to push his material into the loopy. Still, his assured and evocative camerawork intimates that peril lurks everywhere, and there's an alien quality to its performances and dialogue that suggests a world slightly unhinged.

Overflowing with super-slow motion, color filters and the clunkiest of flashbacks, The Last Lions frequently amplifies the melodrama to borderline-excessive proportions.

The film risks self-importance, but when Peralta admits through tears just how much he loves his skater charges, it imparts what every parent knows: that even better than achieving one's own success is shepherding the success of others.

Telegraphs its bombshells from the outset and dutifully shuffles toward a conclusion that tethers this saga to Donner’s The Omen.

Cohen’s willingness to do, or say, anything in order to elicit a chuckle at least somewhat salvages The Brothers Grimsby — right up to a riotously nasty climactic gag shoved down the throat of Donald Trump.

Blame for this sports drama’s shallow leadenness can’t be similarly pinned on the supernatural; instead, its shortcomings are attributable to a one-dimensional script and resultant performances that are far less nuanced than its headliners’ ripped bodies.

By minimizing its predecessor’s goofiness in favor of vacuous character drama, winds up only sporadically kicking into gale-force gear.

Too bad, then, that Team Rwanda’s inspiring rise to prominence and eventual course triumphs are so thinly sketched that the film leaves the audience wanting more, in the most frustrating way possible.

Throughout, Una Noche’s details — an old man singing as he staggers down the street, young boys wasting away their days playfully leaping into the water — feel authentic.

Cromwell delivers his defiantly gruff dialogue with amusing relish, while still grounding his protagonist’s actions in desperation and desolation. And his nostalgic conversations with Bujold while the two lay in bed have a naturalness that almost overshadows the creakiness of the surrounding material.

Follows the same basic pattern as the work of her dad M. Night Shyamalan—namely, it starts strong and then slowly falls apart under the weight of its obligations to clarify its baffling scenario.

The film's lack of terror might be more forgivable had it embraced its more humorous inclinations, but the script’s pedestrian liberals-vs.-conservatives, boors-vs.-yuppies conflicts rarely result in anything laugh-out-loud funny.

By weighing everything so heavily, and obviously, in one direction, it eventually comes off as a thinly disguised sermon about ugly oppression and noble suffering and defiance.

Lawrence is never less than commanding in her last outing as the fiery dystopian heroine, but the most heartening liberation proffered by Part 2 is its star’s escape from this one-note fantasy series.

The Animal Kingdom is what an X-Men movie would look like if it doubled-down on its tolerance-for-outsiders metaphor and did away with any exciting superpowered spectacle.

Spike Lee’s documentary on this formative period in Michael Jackson’s career derives its electric, enlivening energy from these fantastic clips. Alas, they’re not enough to alter the fact that this non-fiction effort . . . is merely a nostalgic promotional puff piece meant to look back fondly, and uncritically, at an artist transitioning from a youth-oriented pop fad to the biggest star in the world.