Noel Murray

Though the oppressive artiness makes the early scenes fairly ridiculous, the director's odd methods add rare tension to the climax, as it becomes evident that the finale won't be so predictable in Campion's hands.

There’s very little about Maximum Truth that’s unexpected: not the jokes, not the satire, and certainly not the plot. Barinholtz and O’Brien are funny enough to keep this movie bubbling along, even when it’s low on ideas.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of trying to make a Bad News Bears for the '10s, and Rohal has the comic talent in front of the camera to do the job. In addition to Oswalt and Knoxville, he has Maura Tierney as Knoxville's wife.

Hateship Loveship is unimpressive as a whole, but it’s stitched together with small, memorable touches.

While Lynch has experience delivering breezy action, “breezy” can shade into “frivolous” — or even “forgettable.” As good as Yeun and Weaving are, there’s not a lot here that hasn’t been done

Nekrotronic is “fun,” but often in an off-putting, aggressive way. The Roache-Turners have prioritized fleeting moments of gross-out humor and special-effects dazzle over a controlled pace, or careful world-building.

The Beanie Bubble eventually runs out of steam. The snappy pace and colorful style — so attractive at first — later become alienating, keeping nearly all the characters locked into one dimension.

The film works well when it’s purely existential — just telling the story of a person with a hazy memory, trying to survive long enough to understand his own life.

It's a shame that a movie about the pope as a man shows such scant fascination with the actual papacy - or with humanity, for that matter.

The trolls are the best part of Troll Hunter; they're funny and creepy.

This movie’s heart is in the right place, and its company is pleasant enough. But by its final half-hour, it starts to feel too much like a rote recitation from a rom-com to-do list.

Maggenti is still trapped behind surfaces, enamored of the IDEA of making a buoyant, urbane romantic comedy, while falling short of anything really resonant or personal.

In nearly every way, Silent Night, Deadly Night is as run-of-the-mill a slasher film as the ’80s produced, enjoyable today primarily for its kitsch value.

The overall tone is light and breezy, and while the jokes aren't exactly side-splitting, they do add some welcome eccentricity.

It’s not a great movie but a welcome one, if only for how it attempts to revive a whole genre.

For the most part, this is a tautly constructed exercise in suspense, set among striking-looking snowbound fields and farmhouses. It’s a vivid slice-of-life, even before the literal slicing begins.

This movie is perhaps best described as a clunky but endearingly heartfelt DIY depiction of life among a group of LGBTQ+ kids, striving to live joyfully while being plagued by evil forces, anxious to eradicate them.

Jaud isn’t telling a story so much as he’s making a case, and while his case is persuasive, it doesn’t really work as a movie. The information in Food Beware could fit just as easily--and just as effectively--into a pamphlet.

This story of a lonely kid in need of a father figure seems stubbornly small, given the creators involved. It’s a premise in search of a plot.

As a budget-priced spin on “Sicario” — with elaborate paramilitary action sequences peppered into a story about how lawmen become compromised when they work with crooks — Cartels is passably entertaining.

At its best, the film has the quality of a nightmare, one that keeps happening whether the characters are asleep or awake.

At its best, Cuck emphasizes those moments when Ronnie is reachable: when he’s treated like an ordinary person and tries his best to respond in kind.

Abraham the writer lets down Abraham the director, and ultimately lets down his stars and Spinotti, too.

Once all the pieces are in place, the film becomes a more conventional and less interesting thriller, with a single violent villain the heroes have to overcome.

How to Deter a Robber is a mildly likable dark comedy that never finds a steady groove. It’s neither dark enough nor comic enough; and it never really settles on whether it wants to be a breezy spoof of home-invasion thrillers or an earnest story about teenagers realizing they need to grow up in a hurry.

What begins as a multilayered tale of scientific discovery and cultural history gets reduced to a single maudlin idea: that even Charles Darwin had to evolve.

The particulars of her situation are well-imagined, but Wolman's characters remain little more than mouthpieces.

Once the machete-wielding brutes in wrestler masks appear, though, Trespassers perks up considerably. That’s what makes this genre so perennially popular. No matter who’s cowering inside the house, the assassins at the door make their story more interesting.

While the cast is great, the milieu is vivid, the images are polished and the atmosphere is effectively moody, Things Heard & Seen fails to connect on a visceral level.

It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.

The characters and premise of Pledge are over-the-top, but the movie understands that — whether comedy or horror — all these stories are really about a desperate yearning for belonging.

Written, directed and produced by Vicky Jewson, Close works well when it sticks to the distinctive personal details of this kind of job; but it too often defaults to a run-of-the-mill international thriller.

In a way, Oldman’s presence is symptomatic of a larger failing: the decision to cram together a bunch of cool but incomplete ideas rather than spending the time and money to make proper use of just one.

The Brawler isn’t terrible, but those with any interest at all in Chuck Wepner should start with one of the many better options.

While it’s well-acted and slickly made, the movie’s derivative qualities — coupled with its inadvertent reminders of how crummy everything is outside our doors right now — make it less fun than intended. The light-hearted tone is often grating, working against the inherent drama of a world dominated by giant critters.

Ewing and Grady practically squander the African material, and The Boys Of Baraka doesn't really come to life until the boys return to Baltimore for what turns out to be a permanent summer vacation, due to political unrest overseas.

While Mammoth is frequently poignant and beautifully acted--especially by Williams, who’s so lost and lonely that she becomes casually cruel--the movie lacks the personal touch that’s distinguished even Moodysson’s “difficult” films.

The movie comes off as too much of a grab-bag, as though the filmmakers shot a bunch of footage with no clear purpose in mind, then retroactively tried to figure out how to fit as much of it as possible into something like a thesis.

The gold standard for the modern monster movie remains "Tremors," which combines genuine thrills with clever plot twists and distinctive characters. By contrast, Black Sheep has a bunch of one-note living jokes running around willy-nilly while being chased by killer sheep.

It doesn't help that Sullivan has twice as much screen time and half as much charisma as Braun.

It’s a pleasure just to spend 85 minutes looking at Corbijn’s photos and videos, but as a character sketch (which is really all this documentary is), Inside Out is, perhaps appropriately, pretty spare.

Kuso won’t be for everybody. It’s gross, it’s repetitive, and if it has a point, it’s hard to discern. But it’s not artless. Every densely layered image of oozing pus and gassy orifices is as imaginatively rendered as it is disgusting.

Roddy and Bereen in particular give fully fleshed-out performances, playing agents of a religious institution they both disrespect in subtle and blatant ways. Clarke and company inject some old-fashioned scares into the context of a deeper moral rot.

The actors alone can't sustain Intruders for its full 90 minutes, but for the most part they follow Starr's lead, carrying a film that's both menacing and magnetic.

MacLachlan hasn’t given his main character anything revelatory to do or say. Goodbye To All That is mostly just a series of vignettes, detailing Otto’s sexual misadventures. And even those don’t amount to much.

Finishing The Game doesn't get anywhere that "Hollywood Shuffle" didn't go to first, even if it has its own set of specific complaints about how show business treats Asians.

There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.

Hellion lingers for most of its running time in a betwixt-and-between place, never becoming either the sublime character sketch or the overripe melodrama it alternately promises to be.

In spite of a little bit of sex and a lot of strong profanity, Ordinary Sinner is pretty reminiscent of an old Afterschool Special.

As documentary moviemaking, though, Ellis and Mueller's work falls a little flat.

Three Stars works best as straight-up food-porn.

The twisty plot mostly comes together via flashbacks, following an opening armed robbery. Too often though, Yang opts for brute force over brains, defaulting to violent fights that don't quite fit with the film's overall lightness.

As a morality tale, Haze is old news. But as an in-the-moment explanation of how hazing happens, it’s so fresh, it’s raw.

Most of The Big Scary ‘S’ Word is about the past. But like a lot of calls to action, the film is most effective when it focuses on what’s happening now.

The documentary is fair-minded but vague, and disturbing only when it describes the cat-killing in gruesome detail...Someone should take another crack at this story. Call it "The Art Of Killing Of A Movie."

More speculative than deeply felt.

Feste handles the action and horror in Run Sweetheart Run well; and for those who can handle its more preposterous twists there are trashy pulp kicks to be had here. But given that this movie is also trying to say something honest and angry about how the powers that be protect abusive men, its silliness is a setback.

More than a few times, the film feels choppy, sloppy or paltry. But Wall gives a sympathetic performance as a man facing his final stand. And even at its pulpiest, Happy Hunting has a point to make — about how in modern society we often use the pretense of morality to justify base savagery.

Pierrepoint is handsomely crafted and well-acted, but its sense of scale is as constricted as a noose.

There's little here that's especially cage-rattling or side-splitting. Ultimately, Allah only made these guys mildly likable.

It’s a reasonably grabby tale despite its familiarity and trying too hard to make its milieu menacing.

For all its questionable creative choices, Moby Doc is at least more personal and daring than the typical music documentary. This is the movie equivalent of Moby’s discography, with highs and lows tied directly to its creator’s own embarrassing slip-ups and sublime moments of grace.

The movie does what it sets out to do: stranding the viewer in a dark place, surrounded by remorseless predators. It’s an old recipe that can still please a crowd.

There’s not much new to this plot, but the filmmakers invest a lot of personal feeling and creative energy into their depiction of a rural community populated by the children of immigrants, as seen from the perspective of a kid too bored and angry to appreciate — yet — what makes her home special.

The Edge Of Love is more like a museum piece, placing historical figures in frozen positions, and asking us to judge them as the curators do.

Most B-pictures imitate other movies, but writer-director Mickey Keating’s Carnage Park steals so freely that it almost becomes derivative in an original way.

"Fallen Sun” is best described as a movie-size version of a “Luther” season — which, for longtime fans, is better than no “Luther” at all.

Writer-director Cory Choy and co-writer Laura Allen don’t offer a lot of definitive answers about what’s really happening here; instead they use the premise as a foundation for a series of beautifully shot vignettes, following two troubled souls as they connect with nature and each other

The movie lays out key data points that persuasively — if a bit dryly — position laboratories as the inevitable future of food. But more engaging are the sequences showing technicians at work and lobbyists trying to win over a skeptical press and wary farmers.

Give credit to the filmmakers for making a faith-affirming picture that aims to be more thoughtful than maudlin. But what they’ve ended up with is a fairly rote Christian redemption narrative — albeit with more charts and graphs.

The plot of Punch follows a fairly predictable path, and it lurches into overheated melodrama in its second half. But Ings does a fine job of capturing the instant connection between these two young men.

While the movie’s artfully made and daringly disturbing, Dekker ultimately overestimates how many sick twists one motion picture needs.

The dreary repetition of the affair sinks Careful What You Wish For. That, and the fact that both leads are lightweights. Lucas and Jonas are okay actors, but neither has the wit, gravity, or sensuality to stand up to the classic film noir duos they’re meant to evoke.

In spite of a handful of striking images--4 never resolves into anything special.

Since there's no plot, just a series of anecdotes, much of the meaning in the movie version of On The Road is meta-textual, relying on the viewers' knowledge of who Kerouac was, and how the novel's vision of America differed from how most of the rest of popular culture documented the '50s.

Assisted Living gets a little better as it wears on, and at least it's refreshingly short.

Crawl is action-packed, with impressive special effects and some jaw-dropping images of mayhem and destruction. But a movie like this demands more storytelling discipline and logistical control than these filmmakers can manage.

While Wolf Warrior 2 is blandly generic more often than not, there’s something bracing about its patriotic fervor, which asserts that the Chinese will act in the best interests of the world’s downtrodden, while the rest of the world just exploits them.

Overall, the action here isn’t as taut as it was in “The Reef,” and the shark effects aren’t as impressive. Still, for the most part the movie delivers what it promises.

The best reason to see Don’t Knock Twice is the volatile chemistry between genre favorites Katee Sackhoff and Lucy Boynton.

This is more of a movie for anyone who wants to see burly jerks in cowboy hats get knocked around by a giant, hairy humanoid in the gorgeous Black Hills wilderness — and who doesn’t mind waiting through a lot of slow-paced setup to get to some pretty nifty chases and gore.

Given the gift of Posey at the peak of her powers, Cassavetes squanders her star in low-key, go-nowhere conversations, shot without flair and drained of any improvisatory energy.

The two of them (Washington/Mendez) together, playing police-procedural dodgeball, make for a good movie. Too bad there are other people on the team, and that the pre-game show runs so long.

The slam-bang stuff in this picture is too tediously routine. The movie is much better when it gets philosophical, pondering a world where everybody’s surveiling everybody else but nobody can agree on how to use that information to keep us all safe.

Whatever the film has to say about the sketchiness of modern financial wheeling and dealing remains frustratingly non-specific. The characters all feel like they’ve been copied and pasted from hundreds of other movies that end with armed standoffs in some featureless field or warehouse.

Ends up being another one of those life-of-an-entertainer films that reduces an artist to his most embarrassing moments.

While director Matt Smukler and screenwriter Jana Savage deliver moments throughout the film that feel vividly real, too often they veer into the maudlin or cutesy, as though trying to soften this material for the broadest possible audience.

A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.

Sometimes it’s impressively funky and stylish, and sometimes tediously derivative.

Ultimately as fascinating as it is frustrating.

While Robertson throws in too many cheap jump-scares, he mostly does well by Green's script, coaxing strong performances from the cast and making sure the viewers feel a sickly dread every time some creature is growling and scratching at the ranch-house door.

DiMarco's noir-inflected family drama is confident and mature, but less involving than it could be, because the filmmaker and his star make their anti-hero stubbornly unappealing.

At its best, Taurus captures the tumult of the artistic process, where happy accidents and unpleasant truths are perpetually in conflict.

Like its predecessor, it is enjoyably episodic, jumping from one comic vignette to another. Some of these connect, while others land with a thud. But so it goes with Christmas. Not every present is a winner.

Fichtner’s love for upstate New York — and his interest in exploring the dynamic of longtime married couples — makes this movie easy to root for. But he doesn’t have much of a story, or much of a directorial eye. His passion project is admirable but minor.

Anyone interested in the complexities and controversies surrounding Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in Vietnam may find Danger Close disappointing. But the movie actually works OK as one long fight scene.

A stellar cast and a breezy tone partially compensate for the movie’s shortcomings.

Only one of these two pictures works on its merits, and it’s not “Part V.” But that’s as it should be. That’s true commitment to the bit.

Loktev's efforts to universalize this story by avoiding specifics ends up making Day Night Day Night broad and blank, reducing the lead character to one more generic nutcase for us to fear and pity.

Though clumsy, Particles Of Truth isn't hopeless. Before turning to filmmaking, Elster made her living as a celebrity fashion stylist, so she has a good eye for color, motion, and the feel of New York in summer. And, because she worked primarily on music videos, she uses music well.

A run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, and while Farrands is a solid genre craftsman — as evidenced by his similarly creepy true-crime film from earlier this year, The Amityville Murders — his taste remains suspect.

Lobo overdoes the sudden shifts between the real and the surreal in the last act, refusing to answer any questions definitively until he has to. But the first-time filmmaker shows an impressive amount of confidence in his methods. He knows how to make audiences uncomfortable — first with tedium, then with terror.

Drenner’s overall approach here is too limiting for a character sketch—which may be why That Guy Dick Miller frequently veers off-topic.

The major failing of Division 19 that is that it’s just too busy, bouncing between corporate boardrooms, jail cells and insurgent camps, as though Halewood were trying to squeeze an entire season of a SyFy original TV series into 90 minutes.

Though the whole of Freak Weather is too forced and fitful, significant stretches of the movie hold together. McKenzie gives a magnetic performance.

What the film mostly lacks is its own flavor.

The film gets too mired in shock for shock’s sake in its final half-hour; but for a good stretch it’s a wild and unpredictable ride.

We Summon the Darkness is fine throughout; but it peaks in its first third, when nothing much is happening beyond some very good actors recreating the small-town rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of the recent past.

Something is missing here.

While nearly everything about The Lost Husband is pat and predictable, the movie’s easy to watch. Credit the charisma and polished professionalism of Bibb and Duhamel.

Julie and Charlie make a winning couple, which goes a long way toward making Love on the Villa watchable. But they’re so boxed-in by the movie’s clichés, their love affair rarely gets the chance to breathe.

Admirably imaginative but frustratingly clunky, the sci-fi thriller Let’s Be Evil is a technophobic cautionary tale that ironically demonstrates how fancy new digital filmmaking tools make a low-budget project look spiffy.

The enchanting setting becomes a backdrop to action that’s dispiritingly mundane.

Dense with plot and mythology, the film is refreshingly unpredictable — if only because guessing what comes next would require understanding what the hell is going on.

A good mystery and earnest performances keep the movie lively, though the confined location and limited plot ultimately make the end product feel paltry.

Angels Crest has weaknesses that are tough to overcome. It relies too much on two particularly played-out indie clichés: a spare, plunky soundtrack, and a narrative structure that teases out characters' backstory far longer than necessary.

The cast is terrific, the dialogue is snappy, and Logan has the kernel of a great idea here, connecting the teenage slaughter that fills most slashers to the real-world cruelty of conversion camps. But They/Them never connects on a gut level, as a horror movie should.

Anyone who thinks Beyond The Sea is a movie about Bobby Darin isn't paying close enough attention.

A terrific cast and a rich sense of atmosphere do a lot to keep the Australian drama Angel of Mine suspenseful, even when the plot’s barely developing.

There are jokes here, and dramatic moments too; but everyone is so darn earnest all the time that nothing truly exciting happens. Instead, we just hang out with some pretty decent folks for a while, and then the credits roll.

The Wrath of Becky delivers satisfying action, as this underestimated heroine — well-played by Wilson — makes some terrible people look like absolute fools.

It's a pity such memorable characters are stuck in a story so middling.

This kind of movie can easily become ponderous and pretentious, but Putka keeps everything wide open, in the spirit of his befuddled protagonists.

Too many of these characters behave like they just stepped out of a Noel Coward production.

Even at its bluntest, Seriously Red draws a lot of heat and light from Boylan, whose Red enjoys embodying the casual confidence, folksy wisdom and bombshell bravura of one of the world’s most beloved entertainers.

The filmmaking here is flat, straight, and thoroughly lacking in poetry, and the script--co-written by Cattaneo, Rice, and Phil Traill--tells instead of showing.

It’s good that Wayne takes some chances with a familiar genre, but his excessive fragmentation effectively turns this movie into a 90-minute trailer.

It's more in the so bad it's almost good mode.

Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

This is the first act of a better movie, stretched to fill a feature.

Dylan allows his interviewees to refute some of the more slanderous and/or ill-informed accusations hurled at Soros; but his general approach is to focus more on the accomplishments than the backlash. He’s made a documentary that’s nobly informative, but — given the juicy subject — a tad dry.

Well-produced and engaging, but it’s also anecdotal and conspiratorial, and damnably non-confrontational.

Fans of outsized genre fare should appreciate how much fun Rapace appears to be having, showing off different skills in different wigs. Her enthusiasm doesn’t make this a good movie, but it does makes it likable.

Every time Peaches Does Herself seems to be falling into an inescapable rut of sneering and shock, Peaches comes up with with an image that deepens the whole endeavor.

It's a treat to see Kiefer and Donald side by side, and both give fine performances. But a pairing this special deserved a story more unique than "reluctant killer reaches for his guns."

Argo's job should only be a minor piece of this Gotham mosaic, but Jones makes the racketeering scenes so familiar that they grate against the rest of the movie.

As routine and undercooked as Beneath’s one-wet-corpse-after-another plot is, the movie is still breathtakingly beautiful at times, with compositions and color tones that resemble a high-class fashion-magazine layout circa 1965.

Though it's equally concerned with sensitive young criminals in squalid communities, Schizo is no "City Of God," for better and worse.

But compared to great documentaries about the process behind performance-"Last Dance" and "Original Cast Album: Company" spring to mind-Finding Eléazar is too choppy and fussy.

As the piles of Biggie-related material has proven, it’s perhaps impossible to cover everything this story is really about in under two hours. City of Lies makes an honest effort but doesn’t get the job done.

Chait and company have a hard time coming up with enough plot to justify “Wolf Hound” stretching past two hours; and the long shootout scenes in the movie’s midsection do get taxing. But the extended aerial combat sequences at the start and end of the film are genuinely impressive for a non-blockbuster, and ought to grab the attention of genre aficionados.

While everyone involved with Backtrack is a polished pro, the movie's tastefulness gets in the way of the suspense.

Shotgun Wedding peters out down the stretch, as the explosions and gunfire overwhelm the banter. But the middle hour is snappy, helped by the chemistry of Lopez and Duhamel, playing two over-analytical, over-prepared types who have different ideas on how to thwart their attackers.

The movie has enough of Woods’ flavor to put a memorable spin on a familiar genre — so much so that it’s almost a crime it isn’t better.

Balseros doesn't fully measure up to Michael Apted's work because of the dingy quality of its video-to-film transfer, as well as flaws inherent to a project that started as one type of documentary and ended up as another--namely, that the filmmakers didn't ask enough of the right questions in the first two installments to make the third fully connect.

The situation plays out in a haze of shouting and debauchery so excessive that it becomes silly. The movie looks great and sounds great--apart from what the people in it do and say.

Say this for Albert Nobbs: It's not some run-of-the-mill "life lived in service" drama.

The story doesn’t really develop organically. There are logical gaps and narrative lurches that are hard to ignore.

The film as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense, but from moment to moment it is effectively visceral and raw. It’s compelling almost by accident.

There’s a lot to like in The Violent Heart, with Adepo at the top of the list. But Sanga errs by giving his movie the deterministic structure of a potboiler and the muted tone of a slice-of-life indie drama.

If the movie feels a bit overstuffed, that may be because Poliner clearly cares about these characters, and — quite touchingly — has thought a lot about what would make them happy.

The lack of explosive action hinders Condor’s Nest, as does the reliance on spare, nondescript locations like bars, offices and open fields. But Blattenberger can write punchy dialogue; he also wisely spends some of his money on ace character actors.

Despite a clever premise, decent special effects and an amiable tone, the horror-comedy The Curse of Bridge Hollow never makes the jump from “mildly pleasant time-killer” to “entertaining.”

What’s most frustrating about Devil’s Knot—especially for longtime Egoyan fans—is how generic the movie becomes every time it folds another wrinkle into the case.

While “The Last 49 Days” is awkwardly bloated, it does eventually develop some momentum. Once viewers get accustomed to a movie that can move within minutes from courtroom drama to dinosaur attacks, they may enjoy the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

Viewers will either be transported by Honkasalo's somber artistry or begging for someone to stick a gasoline-filled syringe into their veins...As art, 3 Rooms is magnificent, but as a viewing experience, it's almost impossible.

Monster Hunt combines a lot of qualities from the other items on the all-timer’s list: epic action, elaborate special effects, broad comedy, and a style that could best be described as “exhausting.”

The result is a movie largely devoid of attitude or suspense. My Best Enemy is brisk and eventful, but after a while, it begins to seem like Murnberger is rushing through this material, afraid to dwell too long on any one situation, lest it tip too far into exploitation.

The default middle ground between true-to-life and wacky in I Give It A Year turns out to be a place of dreary artificiality.

The film is unapologetically “low art” … yet fun, in its own way.

The World's dull weave of frustrated romances and worker exploitation is far too obvious, and Jia can only relieve the tedium so many times.

God’s Time has an endearingly scrappy vibe and a talented cast filled with unfamiliar faces. But it also feels cobbled together, as though Antebi had multiple ideas for how to approach this material.

Jigsaw isn’t awful. It’ll do the job for anyone who must see a “Saw” movie in theaters on Halloween weekend. But a trip to a real-world escape room — or rewatching the original “Saw” — might be a better use of time and money.

Jeffers and Hay have a strong chemistry, and they make Peter and Winona’s vivacity and pain feel equally real, even when the movie around them is shading toward the phony.

The Cleveland locations — along with some memorable visual flourishes via skateboard tricks — show that Caple has a unique eye and a strong sense of place. Here’s hoping that next time he applies them to a fresher story.

Though it’s mildly enjoyable throughout, the movie is ultimately just a loose collection of nice little scenes, held together by a few palliative clichés.

Like a lot of low-budget horror, writer-director Matty Castano’s Alone in the Dead of Night is more a case study in shrewd resource-management than it is a movie.

The movie is pretty lightweight — disemboweling aside — but has a fair amount of punch, and it could appeal to connoisseurs of self-conscious pulp.

Palmer is a firecracker as the heroine, a young woman who has to prove she’s as hard — and consequently, as misogynist — as any man.

The parts of Finding Fela that best handle the tricky nuances of Kuti’s worldview are the parts that show Jones and the Fela! creative team grappling with those same questions.

The cast is terrific, and kudos to Boyd for including some specifics about how 20-something Angelenos hook up in the 2010s. But there’s just not enough that’s new here — either in what’s being said, or how.

Director Marius A. Markevicius and screenwriter Ben York Jones fail to find much of a fresh angle on genocide and widespread cruelty.

Fans of ’80s video-store fare should appreciate Barbarash’s commitment to making something this knowingly trashy. The film is only a modest amount of fun — but fun is fun.

Without Cage, there’d be almost no reason to see the by-the-numbers revenge thriller A Score to Settle. With him, the movie isn’t just watchable, it’s occasionally riveting.

Over-written dialogue and some stiff acting weigh Devil’s Path down, especially in the early going. But the action sequences are quite good, deriving nervous energy from the inherent risk of any illicit sexual encounter: that being in the wrong place with the wrong person could prove fatal.

The movie hits all the right plot points but never connects them to a story with any kind of momentum or tension.

A pair of superb performances — from Suzanne Clément as a traumatized pregnant journalist and from Shelley Thompson as a suspiciously solicitous B&B proprietor — can’t overcome an excess of premise in “The Child Remains,” a well-made Canadian gothic horror film that just has too much on its mind.

This movie is a broadly sketched but illuminating depiction of what happens when powerful nations grow weary of sorting through the subtleties of geopolitics and start letting heavily armed secret agents handle diplomacy.

It's sweet, but way too silly.

In the end, what we’re left with is an exceptionally well-acted motion picture that mostly fails to move.

The two leads are so strong in these parts that it’s too bad they rarely get the chance to do more with them.

Mostly, this is a whirlwind trip through the origins of a phenomenon, with an eye toward explaining how America could find these ladies at once sexy and wholesome. The answer? Hey man, it was the ‘70s.

Guerrilla still holds up as social history, primarily because its description of seething frustration in a divided America has become spookily relevant.

The movie’s too slow at the start and somewhat befuddling at the end, but for the most part it’s a haunting, poignant portrait of one woman’s Kafkaesque nightmare.

Thirlby gives a good performance as someone who finds it easier to remain a non-person than to make any effort to fix her life. But the more Holly comes into view, the blander her character becomes.

Foster and Harrelson always stick to the Army's orders about what to say and how to behave. After a while, The Messenger starts to feel equally dogged about following a pat script.

When the movie shifts more toward fright in its final third, Burns and Parker don’t have much new or exciting to offer. But with the help of a strong performance from Mann, they do a good job capturing one family’s feelings of brokenness, and how far they’d go to get back what they lost.

Pachachi doesn't integrate her interviews into any kind of comprehensive portrait of recent Iraq history. They're bunched together randomly, like a collection of vignettes.

Because the actors deliver every line in a breathless rush, their performances are monotone; and because Burrows throws in new characters and ideas every few minutes, the resolution to this story comes out rushed and goofy, and not as poignant as intended.

Though the movie’s leads are undeniably charming, director Steven K. Tsuchida and screenwriter Eirene Tran Donohue don’t give them much to do that hasn’t been done many times before. What does distinguish their film is its setting

The Last Winter's heart is in the right place, but it isn't pumping any blood.

Director Dante Ariola and writer Becky Johnston have such a strong idea at the core of Arthur Newman that it’s all the more frustrating when they follow it down the most familiar path.

A poky thriller that — eventually — delivers some decent scares.

For a movie about the unpredictability of life, Pippa Lee plays it awfully safe.

A clean, tasteful drama (sex scenes aside) that's designed to attract Anglophiles who can't resist green lawns, falling leaves, precise diction, and a clean sound mix.

The main problem with The Promised Land is that Jhally and Ratzkoff are eager to foster dissent, but not to invite it into their own movie. Their talking heads sound rehearsed and repetitive, and the righteous anger dissipates without a contrary opinion to provide a ceiling.

While the film features strong performances and good direction, it's still way too rote. A bunch of kids head into the forest and meet a monster. What happens next is just a matter of connecting the dots.

The more overtly allegorical Innocence becomes, the duller it gets.

Taking Sides is really no less simplistic than "Sunshine," but its predecessor succeeded because of its length and scope. Taking Sides stays rooted in one place and one discussion, and never gets anywhere.

This would be tough material for anyone to tackle, and the Russos take aesthetic chances that — while admirably bold — flop more often than they fly.

Nolte almost makes it work.

There's little in the underdog sports dramedy Champion that feels vital, aside from its star.

Sports broad, sitcom-ish performances and a surprising amount of sweetness and wisdom.

In spite of good performances and colorful design, The Rider Named Death is too grave and remote to stir much emotion.

Tell Them Who You Are is indulgent by design, and the elder Wexler may be right about his son's aesthetic failings.

While Bitton engages in some penetrating conversations, and shoots some artful video footage, Wall never really tops its first scene.

Though the movie's consistently watchable, it's rarely grabby, aside from a few strong jump-scares.

This documentary has its limitations, both as a piece of reporting and as cinema. Tulis and his editors rarely give the viewer a moment to breathe and reflect, as they race through a blitz of images from internet chats and cable shows. Their approach to the documentary form is merely functional at best, and sometimes is visually unappealing.

If The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears were Cattet and Forzani’s debut film, this might all feel fresher, and more revelatory. But as visually stunning as any given five minutes of this movie is, it doesn’t add up to much cumulatively.

The movie’s noisy, busy and not that funny. But there is a sweetness and a cockeyed optimism here. At heart, it’s a salute to American gumption — however misguided.

Dorfman does an excellent job of constructing a dialogue- and performance-driven chamber piece; but he shows less skill at staging fight scenes and raw terror.

Too much of Dear Mr. Watterson is taken up by Schroeder and an array of non-professional C&H-lovers offering vague praise, with little to no real analysis—aesthetic, historical, or cultural.

The Sonata is well-made but not exceptional. It could use fewer long, expository conversations and more heart-stopping horror set-pieces. The actors have a lot of verve, but because their characters are so straightforward — bordering on archetypal — their situation is hard to connect to on an emotional level.

At first, the movie is offbeat enough to be entertaining anyway; but like the title character, it quickly outstays its welcome.

As with Rossi's acclaimed documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times," "First Monday" covers too much ground.

There’s something just a bit off about Satanic Panic, a knowing horror-comedy with some wonderfully wild moments, but with pacing too slack and choppy to give its best jokes their proper punch.

Just as the documentary doesn’t really have the goods when it comes to solving the photograph’s mysteries, it only skims across the surface of what the picture represents.

The band is sincere, and many of its followers are just as sincere, but there's always a danger that too much "screaming" can turn a meaningful statement into an inarticulate din.

While the players are circling and silently sizing each other up, the audience may find itself straining to look around them, to see the history they're blocking.

Though it never rises above the level of “interesting experiment,” the dystopian thriller The Bellwether teems with so many ideas that even the bad ones don’t weigh it down too much.

In the end, all these sexual shenanigans just provide an excuse to play some seductive music and drink in some seaside scenery. Ah, Europe.

The Ledge is a sometimes-fascinating, often-aggravating chamber thriller that works best when it's doubling as an inquiry into faith.

Moscow Never Sleeps is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.

For all the flayed flesh and impaled skin in the picture, this Hellraiser isn’t sharp enough.

The more fanciful qualities of Freaks vs. the Reich work fairly well. Mainetti has a gifted cast and a talented special effects department, so the scenes of these X-Men-like outcasts fighting fascism do look fantastic. But the film’s exhausting length is a challenge, as is Mainetti’s failure to use his historical setting meaningfully.

There's been a proliferation of "globalization sucks" documentaries over the past couple of years, but few have been as blunt as Black Gold.

The movie’s final act takes too grim a turn, leading up to an ending that’s overly dark and disgusting. But even as it goes way over the top, “Hunter Hunter” stays focused on the fragility of the Mersaults, who want to live by their own rules but discover that nature has its own agenda.

At its best, Another Kind of Wedding understands how hard it can be for families to look past their own burdensome self-mythology, to see each other again as just people.

The ideas outpace the action in a movie that’s clearly been made with passion and intelligence, but without the kind of zip that this kind of story demands.

If a middle-American teenager in the late 1980s wanted to see good-looking young folks build a giant ramp in their backyard and do spectacular mid-air twists, then the local video store could satisfy that fantasy, too.

It’s an artful piece of work, with some memorable moments where these Texans pick at each other, playing on the weaknesses that are hard to hide in a small town. But the movie is also relentlessly sour, reducing nearly everyone in it (except Joan) to a few immediately observable and mostly unflattering traits.

This is a long, miserable wallow, making audiences feel every dark minute of its title.

This film offers a flurry of provocations and up-to-the-minute cultural references that never fully connect. It keeps coming to the brink of saying something clearly and furiously about sex, power and class before retreating back to the simpler path of raw shock value.

Based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling mystery novel, the Mike Barker-directed Luckiest Girl Alive — with a script by Knoll — falls into the trap of trying too hard to capture not just the book’s flashback-heavy plot but also its distinctive voice.

The humor is often broad to the point of being shrill — especially once an eccentric genius nicknamed “Hopper” (Lee Kwang-soo) joins the team. For the most part though, The Accidental Detective 2 whooshes by, easily and forgettably.

Burnette handles the genre film and the art film pieces of Silo fairly well but shortchanges them both by not committing fully to either.

For all its documentary-style urgency, Private often feels forced.

The main problem with Him is that it takes the form of a generic indie dramedy about a hard-luck dude, desperate for a turnaround in his personal and professional life... Him does have a few scattered moments of Her-like insight and vitality, though.

The movie’s length is excessive and its arc over-familiar, but for those who don’t mind a little sap — or a lot — Greater is effective.

If nothing else, the shaggy romantic comedy Celeste And Jesse Forever establishes that Parks And Recreation's Rashida Jones is a movie star.

The cast is talented, the direction is fairly crisp and the dialogue isn’t stiff. When the people who made this movie move on to something better, they’ll have no reason to be embarrassed by where they started.

Though Robbins acts a little stiff, Morton remains stunning throughout, playing a mixture of her wide-eyed, deeply sensitive characters from "Morvern Callar" and "Minority Report." She suggests worlds within worlds.

Eminence Hill isn’t that good, but as edgy westerns go, at least it’s on the right trail.

Even for a fairly low-budget movie, Tusk doesn’t feel thought-through, or focused enough.

Everyone involved with Bloody Hell is doing their jobs with creativity and gusto, even if it’s hard to discern any larger point.

Writer-director Matthew Berkowitz’s crime drama A Violent Man has all the pungent cynicism of a classic film noir but lacks the urgency. A slower-than-necessary pace drags on a movie that’s otherwise well-written and well-acted, and which makes good use of its setting in the world of mixed martial arts.

The slick animation and exciting battles lose their novelty eventually, and there’s just not enough here in the way of edge-of-the-seat storytelling or vivid characters to compensate.

This is the rare martial-arts film where the martial arts are tedious and the conversations more compelling.

Overall, The Shelter is a bit too clever for its own good. The hero’s personal hell is too literal, and the movie as a whole is too slight.

When the sequel’ is really clicking, it becomes action cinema in its purest visual form: just one buff, taciturn dude doing major damage to his enemies. But those scenes constitute only about half of Mechanic: Resurrection.

It’s not exactly side-splittingly funny, and it doesn’t amount to much. The ideas are strong, but the storytelling’s practically nonexistent.

Writer-director-actor Miles Doleac’s sprawling Southern-fried mystery The Hollow has the rich characters and milieu of a good literary novel, but never quite works as a movie.

Di Florio loses her grip on Liuzzo's story whenever she lapses into generalities. But when Di Florio gets into the specifics of her subject's legacy, Home Of The Brave stands out as both relevant and moving.

It's About You's sound is relatively clean and dynamic, but there's nothing remotely resembling a narrative here.

Excellent production values and a decent premise help hold together “Billionaire Ransom,” an otherwise rickety thriller constructed from used parts.

Miike has served up some of the most dumbfounding images in contemporary cinema.

There’s an outstanding short film lurking within Diane, a sketchy, enigmatic thriller that writer-director Michael Mongillo (reworking a Matt Giannini screenplay) can’t quite fill out into a feature. Strong performances and some memorably dramatic moments suggest what might have been, had the movie been more focused.

While Williams and Faith do a fine job of capturing the frustrating powerlessness of a low-wage-earning woman in a sexist and classist society, The Power never generates much in the way of shocks or excitement.

This movie is still, ultimately, a generic shocker. But the amount of care lavished on the character-building and scene-setting is impressive, even if it doesn’t add up to much.

The simplicity of Lone Survivor eventually becomes a handicap, because after a certain point, the film becomes just one long battle sequence, lacking narrative ebb and flow.

Where before, Porterfield seemed to be recording life as it’s lived, here, he’s mostly recording plot. The difference is glaring.

The major failing of Ana Maria In Novela Land is its unevenness. The comedy is never all that funny, and some scenes fall noticeably flat, either because the cast isn’t strong enough, or because the production as a whole lacks polish.

Broderick, Alda, and Madsen are all fine--and Alda has some poignant moments as he realizes the implications of his forgetfulness--but their presence in a movie like this reaffirms its conventionality.

The creature effects in Strange Nature are top-notch, but Ojala has trouble making them scary. His plot’s too scattered to build any momentum.

Glasshouse holds back a few provocative secrets for its final third; and throughout, Egan borrows from the likes of “The Beguiled” and leans into the sensuality of her premise, in which a handful of lonely ladies are suddenly delivered a handsome stranger.

That seems to be one of the main theses of Unforgivable: that nothing is as dramatic as it appears, and presuming otherwise means risking unnecessary trouble and pain.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

Writer-director Dan Rush could've approached this material in dozens of ways, but the way he chooses-turning it into an occasionally wry, ever-earnest dramedy-is precisely the wrong one.

The film’s dialectic qualities can feel a little forced and wooden, though Ritch mitigates this somewhat by directing his cast to deliver their lines at such a snappy clip that viewers don’t have time to dwell on the clunkers

But while once upon a time Daldry made a very good movie like "Billy Elliot", here he lets what should’ve been an efficient little thriller get stymied by an excess of style, and the weight of self-importance.

For the most part, Fear the Night feels like it could have been made by almost anybody. It’s crafty enough, but it’s lacking LaBute’s usual acid wit and fearless provocations.

While the script (co-written by Eisener and John Davies) is weak, there is an endearingly scruffy vibe here, goosed by some cool-looking costumes and effects.

There’s a context to Struzan—not just biographically, but culturally—and while Sharkey seems to understand that, his movie, ironically, doesn’t illustrate it particularly well.

While City of Dead Men has an appealingly polished look and uses its unusual locations thoughtfully, it teeters on the edge of pretension.

Sorry About the Demon is too slackly paced and there’s a broad tone to the jokes and performances that skews corny. But the central comic premise is a hoot; and the movie has an unexpectedly philosophical dimension.