Nick Schager

Jem has less in common with its neon-drenched ‘80s source material than with the real-life Internet-to-red-carpet trajectory of Justin Bieber — a similarly generic teen idol with moves dully modeled on superior artistic predecessors.

Rarely has a mainstream comedy boasting this much talent been so structurally amateurish, to the point that the film’s lack of humor seems a secondary problem to its more pressing storytelling incoherence.

It might be asking too much for The Diabolical to fully live up to its cheesy-ominous title, but the sheer unadulterated inanity of these proceedings suggests that it'll soon be teleported to the far corners of the B-movie streaming-video abyss.

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.

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.

A film that assembles many of the author’s most memorable creations with noisy, tossed-off sloppiness.

Favoring long, unbroken takes that allow the rhythmic, full-bodied songs to breathe as they ebb and flow from beginning to end, Anderson’s aesthetics unobtrusively capture the magic of Greenwood and company’s global partnership

If you can get on its wacko wavelength, it's a uniquely crazed, compelling midnight-movie whatsit.

This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.

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.

Buoyed by a script brimming with authentic back-and-forth ribbing and confessional exchanges, newcomers Baquet and Dargent exhibit an alternately ribald and frank rapport that, like the film itself, taps into the volatile anxiety of finding one’s self.

The use of the actress’ own archival material in 'In Her Own Words' results in a tribute to both her titanic career, and to her belief in the movies’ capacity to safeguard the past, and to maintain it long after its makers are gone.

Any message about the need for open-mindedness in life and love, however, is muddled by a slapdash plot that ultimately cares less about taking a stand in favor of progressive values than it does in superficially employing such feel-good ideas for unimaginative, hyperactive adolescent slapstick.

Pan is a cacophonous assault on the senses, all computerized cinematographic mayhem and deafening noise, and its hurried pace extinguishes any genuine character development.

In its portrait of a strong, independent woman learning to embrace her own ambition, desires, and future via the aid of an older male mentor-cum-father-figure, it colors its triumphant fantasy of female empowerment in a distinctly conservative, paternalistic shade.

The director’s assured tracking shots follow Nazaret through one bustling, disorienting locale after another as he searches for help, family, and relief from his hardship. Yet like the film, they’re ultimately superficial gestures that maintain a detached perspective on their subject, incapable of penetrating his traumatized mind and tormented heart.

Director Wes Ball’s adaptation of the second book in author James Dashner’s popular series is the exact opposite of its predecessor, presenting a sprawling adventure that, when not liberally cribbing from more illustrious sci-fi forefathers, spends plentiful time fleshing out the dull details of its oppressed-youth scenario.

Like so much teen-targeting modern horror, it opts for dull angsty brooding over the very sort of grim-and-gruesome sleaziness that might have made its premise interesting.

Despite an appealing trio of leads, it seems likely to entice only those with an unquenchable thirst for thriller cliches.

It may not be a complete return to form for the once-revered auteur, but as an unexpectedly chilling horror concoction defined by skillful scares, it’s a significant step in the right direction.

Amidst this goofiness, Skrein proves a serviceable Statham replacement, capable of executing elaborate martial arts-inspired fight moves, glowering behind the wheel of his car, and generally acting like a cold, detached thug-for-hire who, deep down, has a heart of gold.

Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.

Ultimately too busy fracturing his story’s focus and indulging in gimmicky textual graphics to really tap into either Hollywood’s or electronica’s magnetic appeal, Joseph’s debut proves to be a film with mood to spare but nothing much to say.

A preposterous, monotonous action saga primarily notable for boasting a miscast lead and advancing a less-than-tolerant geopolitical fantasy.

While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.

The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.

Incisively intimate, it's a small but stirring snapshot of a gifted, hopelessly lonely soul.

Thorny issues regarding patient-caregiver relationships, cost-vs.-care tensions, and morality-vs.-rules dynamics are handled with a minimum of didacticism by Lilti, whose handheld camerawork provides a measure of immediacy without calling undue attention to itself.

These grating characters frequently burst into songs that are not only ill-fitting, but also — as with every other aspect of this indie — awful.

The overarching sense is of a thriller awkwardly stitched together in the editing room, and still failing to fix its many flaws.

However oblique it remains, Sunset Edge feels like the work of curious filmmakers, searching for intangible truths in sights of people exploring both a past that’s been forgotten by most, and a present that can’t seem to quite move forward in any meaningful, appreciable way.

Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").

Snapping necks and shooting limbs have rarely been carried out in service of such a principled cause — or been executed with such formulaic tedium.

Proving that its chosen genre is best when its tropes are treated with a balance of sincere sweetness and wink-wink absurdity, Playing It Cool thrives through sheer liveliness, as well as the chemistry of its perfectly paired stars.

Its plotting is often a tad too plodding, but with the charismatic Mortensen exuding understated internal crisis (in a French- and Arabic-speaking role), Oelhoffen's film proves a compelling portrait of individuals striving to cope with, and at least somewhat overcome, cultural dislocation.

Crowe's visual framing and dramatic staging are as assured as his compelling lead performance. Yet as his story becomes weighed down by issues of cross-cultural understanding, forgiveness, and second chances...the film comes to feel like a slight, straightforward tale distended to tedious lengths.

No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama.

While its unconventional approach eventually becomes a tad wearisome, Morgen’s film proves a uniquely revealing exploration of the development, and eventual disintegration, of the heart and mind (and spirit) of a musician incapable of finding solace in, or transcendence through, his angst.

Bolstered by deft editing that keeps the proceedings moving at a light, graceful clip, this behind-the-runway look at one of fashion's legendary brands has a sleek, efficient stylishness in keeping with its subject.

There's no more disposable type of comedy than the genre spoof, and no greater example of its general creative worthlessness than The Walking Deceased, an interminable 90-minute goof-off propped up by references to popular zombie-apocalypse fiction.

Tracers is a tedious, clichéd slog from start to finish, and only briefly enlivened by two prolonged chases in which handheld cameras maintain intense proximity to their subjects.

Writer-director Adam MacDonald's direction creates an ominous sense of rural-nowhere isolation, and his script avoids contrived banter while shrewdly suggesting it's headed toward horror before unexpectedly veering into survival-story territory. Nonetheless, such misdirection can't compensate for hopelessly routine action.

A deranged pseudo-feminist fable, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its tedious time getting to its unrewarding destination.

Emitting the unpleasant stench of over-affectation, Treading Water slaps together its particular peculiarities with such randomness, it’s as if the film were conceived from blindly throwing disparate elements at the wall.

When Reggie advises Eleanor, a former cornet prodigy, to protect her artistic "gift," Like Sunday, Like Rain finally achieves maximum phoniness.

Carolla's stilted screen presence and groan-worthy zingers neuter any humor from Bruce's needy quest to return to the spotlight.

Emphasizing action over the spoken word, The Salvation doesn't break new ground, yet its murderous twists of fate are consistently compelling.

An unfocused mishmash that thrives only when it fixates on footage of actual bouts.

Canny and funny in equal measure, it’s a film that embraces technology — just like it does its protagonist — on its own perfectly imperfect terms.

After poking fun at both Green's lack of originality and the hackneyed nature of found-footage shockers, Digging Up the Marrow merely resorts to climactic shaky-cam footage of people running through the pitch-black woods -- thereby becoming the very dull, clichéd thing it mocks.

Amid much talk about character, story structure, and theme, Grant delivers his usual rakish-charmer routine in a role that’s as hackneyed as the script’s portrait of women, the movie industry, and Star Wars fanatics is one-note.

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.

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

The film is proof of both Garrett’s titanic skill at putting bow to string, and his decidedly less accomplished gifts as an actor.

Romantic comedy clichés are given a superficial East-meets-West (and vet-back-home) makeover in Amira & Sam, a love story whose likable stars can’t compensate for a story that tediously adheres to formula.

Throughout, the complexities of the charismatic fighter's life are only cursorily referenced so that the celebratory tone may not be marred, with Manny ultimately content to treat its subject with kid gloves.

Throughout, Helberg's awkward-anxious routine proves insufferable, and it's made no more tolerable by supporting turns from Zachary Quinto, Alfred Molina, and Judith Light, who are given so little to do that their presence in this mess feels downright cruel to both them and us.

Chockablock with instances of characters not shooting, running, attacking, or sneaking away when they can or should, this thriller comes off like the world's most rigged game.

Eric Lavaine's midlife-crisis dramedy piles on dreary subplots involving Antoine's grating pals and their one-dimensional romantic and/or financial problems, but his material is unfunny and superficial to the point of inertia.

For the most part, writer-director Sophie Fillières’ If You Don’t, I Will strikes an engaging tone of melancholic humor through its portrait of a French marriage slowly falling to pieces.

The camera tracks every emotional up and down, through tests and surgery, with an unfussy precision that allows the themes to arise naturally.

The Foxy Merkins would have made an idiosyncratic and amusing short film; at 80 minutes, it's a one-joke comedy that quickly overstays its welcome.

Content to stay on the surface, it's a puff piece posing as a real documentary.

Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.

From Dave to The Dictator, politicians-replaced-by-doppelgängers has long been a favorite comedy movie device — yet never has it been employed for more torturous faux-funny business than in Viva la Libertà.

Like so much of his celebrated work, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery is long, leisurely paced, wide-ranging, meticulously crafted, intellectually intricate, and touched with profundity.

Against all good sense, Exists plays its material straight, possibly proving itself the year's most laughably derivative and dreary film.

Strong, understated performances from Baird and O'Connell bring real intimacy to their characters' sometimes-strained mother-son dynamic.

It’s a stagy setup whose theatrical roots are always front and center, yet it’s one that’s handled with aplomb by director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), whose latest has enough visual panache to compensate for the static, conversational nature of the work.

The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.

Unfortunately, no amount of softcore titillation can compensate for all the cheap special effects and faux-profundity dispensed by this superhero-self-help dud.

The filmmakers profile the prolific Mark Landis with a non-judgmental straightforwardness that allows the sheer brazenness of his scams to generate both shock and amusement.

Despite being an aesthetic bore, The Green Prince sets itself apart from the nonfiction pack via a recent story of two unlikely comrades’ heroic sacrifice, moral courage, and cross-cultural dedication to peace that’s not only gripping, but all too timely.

With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.

Helen's extreme behavior is at once a reaction to, and rebellion against, her mother and father (and their separation), which, along with a captivating go-for-broke lead turn by Juri, lends the film a poignancy to help offset the juvenile shock-tactic impulses.

Szász's harrowing film roots that coming-of-age process in suffering, depicting it with a grim solemnity that, by never wavering, ultimately leads to a tempered measure of unexpected hopefulness.

Cursed with a vague, rambling script and an equally indistinct lead performance, the film is a scattershot series of vignettes about self-definition that, ultimately, never coheres into a lucid whole.

Just as dispiriting as its lack of scares (or sense of humor) is Septic Man’s lack of purpose -- devoid of any commentary, the film pointlessly wallows around in the muck, thereby making itself as valuable as those nasty things routinely flushed down the toilet.

A pandemic thriller infected with horror-film clichés, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero ditches the nasty allegory of Eli Roth’s original and Ti West’s studio-butchered first sequel for far duller, standard-issue conventions.

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

The result is a lumbering attempt at sweet-and-saucy romance, all affected emotion and strained bad-boy humor.

Rather than having its characters’ circumstances reveal something about societal dynamics or human nature, Aftermath avoids depth; Engert casts his material in strictly suspenseful terms.

Practically guaranteed to elicit tears within its first five minutes, Alive Inside... is nonetheless more than just a tearjerker.

More problematic than its lack of a compellingly laid-out time line is the film's habit of hopping between points of interest, so that every one of its chosen topics...is treated with a few catchy sound bites.

Nice to look at but tedious to endure, A Five Star Life boasts a muted classiness that doesn't mitigate its phoniness.

There's no type of documentary as shallow as those covering modern music festivals, a fact reconfirmed by Made in America.

Guy Ritchie may have creatively moved on from his Tarantino-inspired debut, but international crime cinema has not, as again evidenced by Magnus Martens's film.

A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.

Rife with jealousy, treachery, and violence, it's a stylish portrait of the tangled relationship between cinematic and real-world sleaze.

This understated indie deepens its portrait of growing up by suggesting, ultimately, that anyone who thinks wasting time is a reasonable course of action needs to wake up.

Rarely has the terminal seemed as interminable as it does in Lullaby.

Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.

It's an over-the-top cautionary doc less convincing than the weight-loss ads on Facebook.

Owen and Binoche's vigorous, battle-scarred performances, prop up Words and Pictures even when its plotting resorts to unbelievable devices.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

Its suspense is so nonexistent, and its supposed concerns—about the reliability of memory and the nature of truth—are handled so facilely, the film sells its own conceit short.

Aided by three-dimensional performances that exude a convincing mixture of bitterness, selfishness, desperation, and hate, Ayouch film casts a sharp gaze on tragedy, and the larger socio-economic issues that beget fanaticism.

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.

If the proceedings prove far too familiar, director Caradog W. James delivers a few striking images... as well as a sinister cautionary-tale finale made all the more unsettling by its use of a sterling John Carpenter-style synthesizer score.

It's a film that paints a potent portrait of an artist of righteous, controlled fury.

Puenzo dramatizes her material with an overcooked sense of import that generates scant suspense.

A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.

Kid Cannabis presents its material not as cautionary tale but as celebratory fantasy — which, like Nate's mom turning a blind eye to her son's illegal operation, seems to be the by-product of either inanity or excessive THC.

Replete with superb performances led by a paranoid Sackhoff and unhinged Cochrane, it's the rare horror film to know how to tease malevolent mysteries and deliver satisfyingly unexpected, unsettling payoffs.

Unfortunately, while the documentary’s points are clear, its desire to articulate them primarily through contrasts neuters some of its persuasiveness.

Carano’s badass-beauty charm notwithstanding, it’s a grim, formulaic saga in desperate need of some genuine B-movie fury and flair.

Writer-director Freida Lee Mock’s concise and potent chronicle uses a wealth of archival video and numerous new interviews with its subject to properly contextualize Hill’s testimony as a landmark moment in the fight for gender equality.

It's a techno-thriller of brain-dead proportions.

Dark House practically drowns under the weight of mismatched horror tropes, including a preponderance of loud-noise jolt-scares and idiotic character behavior.

The story is a hopeless mess that from the outset seems to be missing key exposition that might help fill in some of its many gaps.

The camera swoops and whooshes about but never generates any compelling energy — Chow's film proves endlessly manic but devoid of much mirth.

The trouble is that Grovic's attempts to generate suspense by keeping character identities and motivations unknown leaves the proceedings feeling vague and slapdash.

Short and sweet, it's an empathetic and affecting tribute to the great — and vital — artists who all too rarely receive a center-stage encore.

This trio of leads is so wooden, they make Mann’s hysterically over-the-top villainy seem refreshingly energetic by comparison.

Haunt winds up being memorable only for its absence of subtlety or surprise.

Fairbrass proves a hulking wannabe ass-kicker without much distinctive charisma, and his leaden performance is matched by sleepy, one-note supporting turns by the slumming-it Patric and Caan.

Mistakenly convinced that cuteness can compensate for a lack of basic believability, The Right Kind Of Wrong squanders its engaging leads and cheerful joviality with a plot of stupefying senselessness.

An inspired-by-real-events drama that finds honor, decency, and sacrifice in the legal profession, The Attorney is a rousing old-Hollywood tale of one man risking everything for a just cause.

The film indulges in much wannabe-funny wailing, shrieking, and flopping about by Nénette and Paul, only to then lace its buffoonish material with semi-serious undercurrents.

A tiresome film that itself knows nothing but other rom-com plots.

The way the film hews to tiresome conventions is itself a buzzkill, but worse is its sheer lack of energy, as Pearlstein stages serious and/or heartfelt conversations that go on twice as long as necessary and treat the characters as more than the two-dimensional caricatures they actually are.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

Never less than predictable and all-too-often torpid, it’s a work that filters roiling true life through stolid formula.

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

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

It's somewhat surprising to find the filmmaker's sequel marked by such a lack of urgency. The action here seems dutiful, devoid of the indignation at criminal vileness that seethed below Outrage's surface.

The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.

Raze leaves the background particulars about this competition oblique, partly because it adds a layer of ominous mystery, but primarily because it doesn't matter; witnessing women-on-women violence is the thing here, regardless of any narrative context.

Bolstered by performances that convey profound grief and remorse without look-at-me histrionics, The Past is steeped in the believable micro details of its scenario while also expanding to universals.

Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s comedy (based on Delaporte’s play) comes across as a poor man’s Carnage, with bitter resentments and cruel assumptions erupting from beneath its characters’ seemingly cheery, jovial façades.

Despite its wealth of urgent footage, including clips of raids on pimps’ homes and arrests of johns that expose the seedy masculine desire and domination driving the sex trade, Tricked doesn’t have anything new or particularly eye-opening to say about its subject.

Employing straightforward, music-free aesthetics that express the grim realities of his story, director Funahashi captures both grief and outrage in equal measure.

From a purely suspenseful vantage point, Big Bad Wolves is an efficient and effective beast.

What's really absent from this fiasco is a sense of purpose or an interest in character, as the participants in this weekend-getaway contest are ciphers defined mainly by their degree of obnoxiousness.

Crave is nothing but empty movie-shout-out posturing.

The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.

Amid much overacting, Kaige addresses the subjectivity and unreliability of images through this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scenarios that would make Jack Tripper groan.

Without comments from Akka's Jewish residents or any conflicting voices, the film plays like a propagandistic attempt to reshape historical and contemporary narratives.

Director Rola Nashef's visuals can be clunky, and her script's conversational dialogue is occasionally stilted. Nonetheless, she draws her characters in sharp lines, so that the gaggle of customers who frequent Sami's workplace...feel not like types but, rather, like diverse individuals.

Despite some pleasant backstage-footage filler, however, 12-12-12 ultimately so truncates its artists' performances (each is given one song, and those are heavily edited) that the effect is like watching the original TV broadcast in fast-forward.

Wiseman's generally static camera spends prolonged periods of time in the classroom, at student gatherings, and in the halls of educational power, training a multifaceted gaze on opinions regarding an economic shift affecting faculty salaries, subsidized programs, student tuition, and the university's fundamental "public" character.

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.

Pasikowski isn’t interested in actual characters or narrative nuance; rather, the prime concern here is censuring Polish anti-Semitism, which, no matter how righteous an aim, eventually comes at the expense of engaging storytelling.

Scene after scene is defined by blunt exposition and gooey maxims, not to mention cornball visual metaphors.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

Style can't fully compensate for a tale that, underneath its gorgeous affectations, proves undercooked, especially during a third act that provides duly titillating answers to its initially beguiling mysteries.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

It's hard to quibble with Steve Race's film on theological grounds, though in narrative and aesthetic terms, there's something unholy about its mixture of inane clichés, shallow music-video glossiness, and incessant preaching.

Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra’s documentary boasts an economical sleekness that’s in tune with the designers’ concepts.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

Snow Queen proves both visually cruddy and narratively muddled.

J.C. Chandor creates an austere snapshot of human struggle, ingenuity, and perseverance, one that's predicated on Robert Redford's fantastic performance.

Ben Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underline every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.

Prospects are dim no matter where these people choose to reside, and A River Changes Course captures their struggle with an ethnographic gaze that generally maintains enough detachment to avoid excessive, judgmental handwringing and heartstring-tugging.

The proceedings somewhat sidestep the issues of risk and responsibility—including the raised, but never fully tackled, question of whether others should have gone back to try to save their fellow, trapped compatriots—that seem most in need of investigation.

No amount of intentional stabs at humor can offset the hilarious awfulness of Dario Argento’s Dracula.

It’s stale B-movie rubbish of a barely watchable sort, albeit slightly more depressing than many of its genre compatriots.

It's a mannered, over-the-top approximation of real anguish and hopelessness that's so phony that it's borderline insulting to those who've truly experienced such tragedy.

The film exhibits a contemplative quiet and attentiveness to detail that enhances its issues of regret, bitterness, and confusion, many of which are rooted in thorny parent-child relations.

Maudlin and mirthless, it's a film misbegotten enough to almost make one hate Christmas.

Director Declan Lowney's film operates from a conceit that affords only minor opportunities for true hilarity.

A heartening but tempered portrait of the media’s ability to effect social change.

[The] aesthetic structure creates a haunting sense of the simultaneously wonderful and sad feelings both men have about lives and loves now gone, never to be recaptured.

A blistering portrait of rebellion against social discord, marginalization and oppression, and a call to arms for true democratic ideals of dignity, justice, and fairness.

There isn't a moment in Hôtel Normandy that isn't painfully contrived, yet, worse still, its mix-ups boast all the inspiration and excitement of a weekend getaway at the local mall.

That My Lucky Star isn’t serious is less an issue than the fact that its comedic action is so broad, ridiculous, and predictable that it soon feels juvenile, akin to a training-wheels variation on various genre formulas.

Like so many documentaries made in a pop style, Generation Iron is a squandered opportunity, sacrificing depth and insight for superficial portraiture and drama.

The film strikes a fine balance between hilarity and heartbreak.

From fawning beginning to maudlin close, it’s a monotonous, wannabe-mythmaking biopic for Ip completists only.

Given Men at Lunch's compelling argument that the identity of its anonymous ironworker subjects is beside the point—that mystery is a prime facet of its enduring appeal—the documentary's desire to determine who they really were comes across as unnecessary.

Insidious Chapter 2 picks up where its predecessor left off-- in abject silliness.

Debut writer-director Shaka King dramatizes her characters' descent into disarray with disarming intimacy.

Director Luc Besson treats his protagonists as likable cartoons yet never provides a single reason to view them as anything less than remorseless, repugnant psychos.

What’s proffered isn’t a scientific argument against a burgeoning agro-industrial movement, but an emotional, quasi-spiritual case about humanity's relationship with the environment.

Blue Caprice otherwise proves a deft mood piece, one that probes its characters’ states of mind while remaining wholly unmoved by their grievances and hang-ups.

Characters scream, throw glasses, screw, and strip nude for the self-gratifying viewing pleasure of others, but Jayne Mansfield’s Car never musters up even the faintest trace of Tennessee Williams-style hothouse drama.

As a ruminative travelogue-cum-dissertation, Rodrigues and Guerra Da Mata’s film is often haunting, and its portentous and mournful atmospherics ultimately help compensate for the nagging impression that it’s a work almost too personal for an outside viewer to fully penetrate.

A committed Bosworth gives herself over to the role. Yet, there’s ultimately no real role for her to play.

A film that's in perfect sync with its subject.

Steeped in centuries of custom and dependent on the ever-fickle relationship between soil, weather, and human craftsmanship, the work is likened by Francis Ford Coppola to a “miracle,” and one that tells a story about the time, place, and circumstances that gave each vintage its birth.

The film’s lack of seriousness isn’t the problem; rather, it’s that its jokey carnage is all caricatured poses devoid of original verve or legitimate wit.

For a film about a killing machine who can see at night, it's fittingly ironic that the film itself is, both narratively and visually, a dark, muddled mess.

It’s well-intentioned, but it’s all diagnosis, no prescription.

A film whose themes are as neatly laid out as its characters' behavior is preposterous.

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.

The doc proves more concerned with promotion than analysis or inquiry, thereby making it a disingenuous non-fiction portrait: an inhibited look at an uninhibited event.

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.

A second-act forest fire proves a handy metaphor for Tautou’s slowly burning rage at confinement. Yet while it seems thematically apt, it’s also wholly out of place in this static, emotionless saga, which is defined less by zealous feeling than by a dull, decorous air of respectability.

The story overflows with reverence but is drastically short on passion or suspense.

Erik Sharkey’s documentary is far less adventurous than Struzan’s own creations, using a straightforward chronological structure and talking-head format to pay tribute to Struzan’s legendary output.

With an intimacy and empathy that's all the more powerful for its modesty, the film investigates the complicated feelings of resentment and affection between wife and husband.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

As bluntly unimaginative as its title.

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.

Coupled with a failure to comprehensively detail tactical patterns or the processes of transporting or fencing stolen goods, Smash & Grab’s inability to truly get underneath the surface of its subjects renders it merely a compelling true-life tale in need of better telling.

Its tolerant messages remain buried beneath lame pop-culture references, hectic slapstick, fart jokes, and endless Smurf-puns that—Azaria's funny, over-the-top cartoon villainy aside—make one pine for the Smurfpocalypse.

It’s too busy pleasing itself with lame references to (among others) Eddie Vedder and Hillary Clinton that suggest the film believes old stuff is funny because, you know, it’s old.

At every turn, Frankenstein’s Army exhibits a preference for jolt scares and gore over actual suspense, which never materializes, thanks to a general indifference to plot and minimal interest in character.

Content to faithfully hew to convention, A Single Shot rarely surprises, but its portrait of foolishness and fallibility, and its atmosphere of inevitable doom, remain sturdy and captivating.

Doggedly manipulative and yet consistently affecting, Broken piles on the miserablism to almost unbearable effect.

Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan.

The real bogeyman is incomprehensible plotting in director Steven C. Miller's Under the Bed, which matches narrative incoherence with one of the most over-the-top portentous scores in horror-cinema history.

Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.

More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.

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.

Intentions and effect are at odds throughout Jorge Hinojosa's one-note documentary.

A few decent one-liners notwithstanding, the movie comes off as willfully uninspired.

Given that the camera always seems to fall or get knocked into the perfect position to capture the craziness at hand, any vérité pretenses soon prove ridiculous. But it’s no more ridiculous than the plot, which incessantly wastes time trying to flesh out its characters, but barely bothers with building suspense.

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.

There isn't a scare to be found in the series's second installment.

Director Wayne Kramer (Running Scared, Crossing Over) makes plain his cartoon-comedy intentions early and often via comic-book-panel-style title cards. The presiding atmosphere of over-the-top zaniness, however, is of a broad, banal sort involving little people, rampant nudity, and quasi-religious nonsense.

Sweetgrass achieves a borderline abstract splendor that's furthered by the directors' avoidance of delving deeply into its human subjects, whose backstories and general circumstances are only alluded to through fly-on-wall scraps.

Coogan's portrayal is heartfelt, but The Look of Love rarely exploits its star's comedic dexterity.

A multicultural mini–Thelma and Louise but far duller than that description implies, Just Like a Woman peddles feminist empowerment with one-note didacticism.

Director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) shows a flair for mythologizing via beautiful panoramas of upstate New York landscapes but less so, unfortunately, through his film's inert story and flat performances.

Lian Lunson’s camera allows the music to take center stage via straightforward, graceful compositions—close-ups and medium shots dominate, and edits are kept to a relative minimum—that allow for long, unbroken views of the artists at forceful, mournful work.

It’s a film that’s about as funny and/or scary as a lump of sod.

A film that plays like a long, tedious inside joke for fanboys.

A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.

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

While incapable of comprehensively contextualizing the craze and only somewhat convincing in its portrait of the power of cocktails to reenergize the traditional local-dive scene, the documentary remains a succinct and lively tribute to the art of the drink—not to mention a handy compendium for those seeking a prime NYC joint to quench their thirst.

Even at a lean 68 minutes, it's a vanity project that's the very definition of insufferable.

An engaging (if somewhat slender) portrait of the violence of adolescent maturation.

Nonsensical and all-around third-rate, American Mary offers up Human Centipede-style surgical horror, except this time with endless absurd eroticism.

Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.

The film rests on the desperate chemistry of a paunchy, weathered Owen and a tense, quietly ferocious Riseborough.

Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.

Mostly, however, Doin’ It In The Park thrives simply via its myriad sights of nobodies juking and dunking their way past opponents, exuding an authentic for-love-of-the-game competitiveness that’s as infectious as it is intense.

A respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh.

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.

As unhinged as it is hilarious.

So little occurs, and so little seems to be at stake, that the action takes on the quality of a tossed-off, not-especially-melodic country-music ditty.

Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.

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

Defined by "Three’s Company"–grade humor, this attempt at male-anxiety cringe-comedy is little more than a sitcom writ large that — courtesy of several awkward transitional fades to black — already feels constructed to accommodate commercial breaks.

An outrageous based-on-real-life tale that's perfectly suited to director Michael Bay's insanely overblown stylistic and thematic temperament.

Like far too many modern horror films, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane flaunts its knowledge of classic genre fundamentals but fails to do anything very clever or surprising with them.

Rob Zombie understands horror as an aural-visual experience that should gnaw at the nerves, seep into the subconscious, and beget unshakeable nightmares.

The battles are staged with moderate intensity but a dispiriting lack of surprise that's also characteristic of the story in general.

The film elevates the story of Jackie Robinson to that of cornball legend rather than just honoring his legitimately uplifting, heroic saga by telling it straight.

Wearing out its welcome long before its moralizing finale, the film...does manage to mine contemporary fears about the increasing worthlessness of a college degree.

Any initial, intriguing otherworldly atmosphere is negated by answers that are more pedestrian than terrifying.

While secret handshakes are amusingly depicted as the key to building trust and friendship, it's Stephen McHattie's greedy agent...that truly hammers home the film's depiction of the art world as fueled by rapacious, kill-or-be-killed bloodlust.

Hardboiled noir play-acting doesn't get more sluggish than in this leaden tale that blurs the line between reality and delusion in a way that's less intriguing than simply confusing.

Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness.

Park's direction is sleek and assured, but lacking the dynamism that might help energize a film that—its title notwithstanding—comes off as dully old-school.

Between the cast's modern hairstyles and attitude, and the paint-by-numbers set design and period costumes...the action comes across as a prolonged, dreary game of dress-up. That director Danny Mooney shoots his material like a TV show doesn't help.

Makinov's film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains' unspoken fury at their elders.

Whether it was all a haunting or a hoax is left unanswered, but the film leaves little doubt that Amityville's greatest source of evil was, fundamentally, parental in nature.

The film is as lightweight as the ganja-puffing is plentiful, little more than a vanity project that allows its subject to wax philosophical on his past triumphs, tragedies, and spiritual development (aided by Louis Farrakhan) from gangland pimp to nonviolent family man.

A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.

It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.

Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.

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.

Todd Robinson's film is a third-rate submarine-set drama until, in its final moments, it sinks to fourth-rate.

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.

Shanghai Calling eventually reveals itself to be just another stale tale about the virtue of morality over ambition.

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

Blending archival footage and new interviews with Nilan, his family, journalists, and fellow combatants, Gibney celebrates hockey's fisticuff traditions while also recognizing how such brutality ultimately takes its greatest toll on those who perpetrate it.

Without any engaging small-scale human drama or larger social or culture-clash import, the film comes across as trivial, and too often also indulgent and pretentious.

The story is ultimately nothing more than a decrepit vehicle for the moldiest of scary-movie clichés: screechy specters, inane character behavior and jump scares that a toddler could anticipate minutes ahead of time.

It's an effective primer on a voluble and charismatic mayor who embodied the spirit of the city he loved.

Álex de la Iglesia's film hammers home the opinion that family is more important than celebrity or wealth.

Ambiguity enlivens the smart, knotty Resolution, which routinely nods to its own artificiality while positing storytelling as a constantly evolving beast apt to save your life one moment and consume you the next.

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.

Messina's performance has a lived-in, emotional messiness, but the film is nothing but clichés.

A stew of cartoon stereotypes, violence, and "Freebird" cast in a skuzzy "Sons of Anarchy" mold.

The eventual appearance of creature fodder in the form of a crazy old coot who lives in the storage facility, as well as a sequel-promising closing note borrowed from innumerable predecessors, ultimately exposes Storage 24 as a monster from a familiar mother.