Noel Murray

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

Anyone looking for history lessons from Rae's documentary will have to be patient and alert enough to pick through the poetry.

By sticking closely to a heroine who's skating on the edge of sanity, the film keeps the audience properly disoriented. Darkness runs deep in "The Lullaby," rooted in the never-ending conflict between mothers and daughters.

Alfred Hitchcock's early films run the gamut from not-bad to dreary, but they're mainly remarkable for how Hitchcockian they are.

The filmmakers and Hardy sharply capture a particular type: the performative rebel, laser-focused on pushing other people’s buttons even while fleeing a demon.

A fragile little movie, occasionally ridiculous, but with M. Night Shyamalan's "Lady In The Water," Giamatti proved that he can make even the weirdest material believable.

Yonkers Joe is largely concerned with the delicate balance between a crook's business life and his personal life--a balance the movie itself has trouble managing effectively.

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

Most of the first half of director Ellie Callahan’s supernatural thriller Head Count feel like a waste of time, made all the more frustrating once the movie starts to improve.

Though “Seven Kings Must Die” suffers some from the gray palette, dim lighting and general somberness that weighs heavy on a lot of modern television, the movie delivers viscerally exciting fight scenes and a strong sense of what life was like in an ancient, unsettled world.

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.

As with the similar ‘80s and ‘90s films of director Chris Columbus (a producer on this project), the characters in Chupa are likable and memorable, with a fun dynamic. And Cuarón — the son of the Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón — creates a rich sense of place here, encouraging the viewers to come to love Mexico as much as Alex eventually does.

The mix of genres and the overload of characters are too much of a drag on the film. Waterston, though, is a wonder throughout, capturing the deep confusion as a woman whose life has been so upended that she wonders if she’ll ever see straight again.

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.

The film looks amazing, but the cranked-up acting (complete with the most rapid-fire dialogue Bogdanovich had yet attempted) is tough to bear, especially as it becomes apparent that James' subtle character study is beyond the story-driven Bogdanovich's capabilities.

Like a lot of the retro-horror films that have popped up on the art-house and festival circuits over the past several years, Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss Of The Damned is more about mood and texture than plot.

Pelosi should be roughed up some, though, for what little she does with her access to the then-president-to-be and the political circus surrounding him.

More speculative than deeply felt.

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

The Sutherland segments are the most bothersome, because they never really reach a resolution, and because they're betrayed by Avelino's uni-faceted approach.

It's best enjoyed as a crackling performance piece.

It's a fascinating film to think about, but far too cool to touch.

Give Fitzgerald credit for ambition and good intentions, but for all its truth-to-power saber-rattling, 3 Needles is distressingly dim.

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.

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.

The Mountain Between Us isn’t a bad movie, overall. The scenery’s gorgeous, the two leads are enormously appealing, and nothing about the dialogue or visual style particularly grates. This is an easy picture to watch… and to root for, in a way, because it’s so rarely overbearing. But it’s only ever mildly engaging.

The movie’s most memorable material is also more grounded.

This is an appealingly polished thriller, with something modest but profound to say about how selfish choices can ripple across decades.

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.

No movie that opens with the line "Time was never a friend to Bobby Long" could possibly be any good, and sure enough, A Love Song For Bobby Long lives down to its squibbed kickoff.

If The Catechism Cataclysm does have something to say, it's that it's possible to enjoy a trip even when it isn't really going anywhere.

Souza and his cast explore a familiar milieu, and though they fall short of saying anything startlingly insightful about it, they do a fine job of making it feel real, and even vital.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well-made but generic, the thriller The Super is noteworthy primarily for featuring one of Val Kilmer’s first substantial roles since recovering from throat cancer. Director Stephan Rick works around the actor’s infirmities, but Kilmer’s offbeat charisma remains unmistakable.

In the words of his own character, this young filmmaker hasn't found his "inner fat girl."

For roughly two-thirds of its running time, the big-screen video game adaptation Monster Hunter feels like an attempt to answer a question no one has asked: What would the “Jurassic Park” movies be like if they were drained of all sense of wonder? The film rallies toward the end with a few genuinely spectacular images, but even its best scenes fail to justify a tedious first hour.

While Saints And Sinners will strike some as a refreshingly even-toned social study, it's also a documentary heavy on talking heads and low on real drama. It's beautifully shot and deeply felt, but, for the most part, hearing a description of the film is as good as watching it.

Wagner and company fail to follow Langella's primary rule of storytelling: "Follow the characters around until they do something interesting."

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

Senior Year is not an ambitious movie, but it’s mostly a sweet one, and frequently funny.

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

Full Grown Men often becomes as intolerably silly as the twee Amerindies it's reacting to.

The “Barcelona” edition is essentially a repeat of the first film, flaws and all.

The actors all look like they had a wonderful time making Supervized, but the material they were given to play is pretty dopey, and way too basic. It’s an insult to superhero fans and senior citizens alike.

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

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.

What sold the original Ong Bak was the action, not the story, and on an action level, Ong Bak 2 lives up to its title.

Even when Alice doesn’t work, it remains gripping. Ver Linden underdevelops her “what if” scenario, but thanks in large part to Palmer the film is a fascinating character study.

There’s a sluggishness to The Returned throughout, attributable to generally weak acting and a plot that requires a lot of exposition.

The result is either one of the most self-indulgent vanity projects in the history of the Hollywood star system, or a rare revealing look at a distinguished actor who usually keeps his real self out of the spotlight.

The outsider road picture Gypsy 83 means well, but writer-director Todd Stephens can't keep his aesthetic out of the way.

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.

The Mission is less about Mormonism or Finland than it is a poignant and relatable portrait of loneliness.

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.

Predictable and corny, but to their credit, Cary and Rose strive to make the situation real.

A paint-by-numbers indie that barely uses its most vivid hues.

The one bit of artsy business that McGee pulls off well is the recurring image of snapshots, serving as a kind of map to who these people were and who they're becoming.

This is a terrific cast, appearing in scenes that have been beautifully framed and lit. Why weren’t they given anything memorable to do and say?

The problem with Desert Wind is that Kohler takes everything at face value. Wouldn't it have been more useful to make this trip the centerpiece of a longer documentary that follows the men before Tunisia and, more importantly, after?

We don’t learn much about how the government or politics work in Afghanistan; and there’s very little in the way of historical background. But by giving a voice both to Ghafari and — in a few scattered scenes — her fierce opposition, In Her Hands does capture with direct immediacy how hard it can be to loosen up a culture with a tradition of rigidity.

Despite the handsome Craig Wrobleski cinematography, and despite a typically fine performance by Patrick Wilson as the lost kid’s dad — slowly going mad in the bush — “In the Tall Grass” runs too long and repeats itself too much to be as gripping as its source material.

Oskar Roehler's serio-comedy Agnes And His Brothers tries to make some incisive points about the damage wrought by society's sexual hang-ups, but though Roehler throws three different characters at the subject, only one halfway sticks.

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

Although Something from Tiffany’s was shot in a festive, lit-up New York City, there’s a flatness to the look and tone of the film that keeps it from crossing the line from “something to put on while wrapping presents” to “something to watch with the whole family every Christmas.”

Overall, The Oranges appears to have been forcibly wrested into a conventional indie-dramedy package, rather than finding the length, style, structure, and perhaps medium that would best suit it.

Gass-Donnelly has a great eye and brings some genuine beauty to his movie’s rural setting. The preoccupation with aesthetics though means that “Lavender” is sometimes quieter, slower and artier than the material warrants.

The situation and the performances are strong, but without a good story to hold everything together, it all falls apart in the end.

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

The revelations taper off in the film’s second half, sapping it of some energy as it hits the homestretch. But the characters’ despair and passion remains gripping throughout, as they force each other into some overdue reckonings with the past.

Ravenous is misbegotten in multiple ways. It isn’t scary enough to be an effective horror movie, or funny enough to be much of a comedy... But say this for Ravenous: It isn’t generic.

It’s too broad in both its humor and its melodrama, and there are so many narrative threads that none of them aside from Driver’s really get their due.

Álvarez and Sayagues have delivered a blood-spattered potboiler that’s no work of genius but is much better than average.

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.

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.

The Whole Truth is a moderately clever, reasonably entertaining courtroom drama, which is only a problem given the talent involved with bringing something this middle-of-the-road to the screen.

It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s really not anything.

Caught hits the usual beats, but with an unusually strong cast and original characters.

If Foxy Brown falls just short of being peak Grier, though, it’s only because it’s a weaker version of Hill’s Coffy, from the year before.

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.

The film is a case study in why critics say “show, don’t tell.” It’s 90 minutes of people talking about routine gangster stuff, peppered with occasional gunfire.

The overall vibe here ends up being less “good dirty fun” than “foul-mouthed teenager trying to look cool.”

There are set pieces scattered throughout Dark Eyes that are as strange — and as strangely beautiful — as the best of Argento, starting with an unnerving opening sequence that sees a group of people in a park gazing at a solar eclipse.

Becomes hard going the longer Baur stretches out the parade of narcissists, all spouting received wisdom, cultural clichés, and bad poetry.

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

The storytelling’s smart, but the style’s tediously reverential and somber.

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.

The film as a whole, though, never hits as hard as it should. The characters are too stock — generic enough that their personalities won’t distract from the looming apocalyptic trouble.

There's a difference between "funny" and "comedy," and the movie adaptation of Killing Bono tries way too hard to be nutty, at the expense of just getting across what McCormick knows.

It lacks the cleverness or the panache to give its schtick the proper zing.

For the most part, Fire Dancer presents an energetic mosaic of a displaced culture.

Both Stallone and the assured young actor Walton give fine, nuanced performances — as does Asbaek. The premise of “Samaritan” is the stuff of cartoons, but the actors makes the stakes feel real.

What this Singing Detective really needed was to be reworked top to bottom, preferably by a writer fleeing some demons of his own.

The sensual sex scenes and raw violence of God's Sandbox make it pretty much an exploitation film, and as an exploitation film, it isn't bad.

HappyThankYouMorePlease has a different vibe than "Garden State" or "HIMYM." It's more like a late-'80s/early-'90s Woody Allen film, after Allen stopped separating his comedy and drama.

A series of third-act complications provides much-needed narrative surprise, but until then, The Three Marias is a disappointingly flavorless genre exercise.

Love Object's plot is reminiscent of Guy Colwell's underground comic-book series "Doll," only Colwell dealt more with sex toys as emblematic of the systematic objectification of women, while Parigi just uses the concept for a bunch of weird shocks, dark laughs, and a fairly repellent twist ending.

The idea of human memory as a kind of time machine is powerful, and writer-director David Gleeson and his co-writer Ronan Blaney make it pay it off well in their movie’s final 10 minutes. It’s the preceding 80 that are the problem.

Evergreen suffers from creeping indie-itis, epitomized by the low-light digital video and droning electric-guitar soundtrack, but its biggest weakness lies in Zentelis' apparent fear of surprise.

Like Agnès Varda’s similar 1962 French New Wave classic “Cléo From 5 to 7,” the thoughtful Here and Now uses one woman’s sudden awareness of her own mortality as an excuse to focus intently on the many moments of intense emotion that make up a day in the big city.

Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.

What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.

The movie’s derivative but lively and has a surprising scope.

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.

Bounce Ko Gals ultimately devolves into a litany of social ills, with not enough of a proper story, and Harada loses the thread of the film whenever he slips into slapstick comedy, or has his female leads play the role of giggly best friends.

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

It's a rare moment when the STORY makes the point, not the speeches.

The disappointing western-mystery hybrid Murder at Yellowstone City strands an excellent cast in a slow-paced story with a muted tone, too far removed from its pulpy inspirations.

Fans of the first Goodnight Mommy may find it a pale, pointless copy. Newcomers, though? They should be suitably creeped out … but, alas, not wrecked.

Thrill-seekers should be warned that this is more a surreal, nightmarish and occasionally sexually explicit trip into an adolescent’s psyche than a spook show. Yakin uses genre packaging for an intense, personal film, which many viewers may find discomfiting — if only because it’s so hard to classify.

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

From scene to scene, Lopez and Caro do fill these broad outlines with real feeling, bringing a personal touch to old pulp archetypes.

If About Alex were the pilot to a new television series, there’d be reason to stick around for a few episodes, if only to see these actors grow into their roles and develop more chemistry. But About Alex isn’t television, and Zwick never really solves the problem of how to make a houseful of semi-likable characters into cinema.

Having two main characters suffering from hauntings separately works against this movie’s narrative momentum, but it does allow Wilson and Teems to bounce from scare to scare, without much setup — or respite.

The film has a nutty premise and a game star, but it too quickly runs out of fresh ideas.

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.

Perhaps the best that can be said of Salt and Fire is that its flaws are wholly Herzog’s. Those flaws are deep. But so is the man responsible for them.

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.

Raises the question of whether Krasinski made this movie because he really loves Wallace’s work, or because just he wanted to show Hollywood that the loveable doof from The Office can actually act.

The two leads help create an atmosphere of quiet surety, but they can't elevate the film beyond its self-imposed smallness.

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."

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.

Skills Like This is never great. But for its first half-hour, it's more fitfully amusing than a movie about a bank-robbing playwright ought to be.

The acting throughout is excellent; and it helps that Barrial isn’t playing Leonard’s predicament for cheap laughs or amped-up drama. Instead, he’s documenting what it’s like these days, to try and find some meaning in life while scrounging all night long, terrified to miss whatever meager scraps are being tossed.

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.

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.

The primary assets here though are Aniston and Sandler, who are totally present in every scene, playing off each other like old comedy pros and coming up with little bits of improvisatory business that make Nick and Audrey feel like a real and loving married couple.

Credit Wilson and Sheen . . . Nothing that happens in 12 Mighty Orphans is unexpected, but these two pros still react with infectious wonder as the messages they send to their students take root and then sprout.

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.

Anyone who doesn't already know and care a little about these characters might find the movie a bit thin.

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

Even with the short running time, writer-director Matt Kane and cowriter Marc Underhill exhaust most of their ideas early. But Kind is touching throughout, as a man who just needs to feel wanted.

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.

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 as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

Still, no matter how Grebin and Nigro are selling it, American Cannibal isn't about the horrors of reality TV. It's about guys like Roberts and Ripley, who convince themselves that ANY job in show business would be preferable to waiting tables.

Friedrich’s snide tone gets in the way, turning a study of capitalism run amok into one artist who just can’t stand all these rich squares and their “fancy dogs.”

Has more flavor than leftovers have a right to.

All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.

Survival has lots of those clever kills; Romero just doesn't provide enough reason for them to be.

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.

Burns has continued to cram one-dimensional characters into thinly plotted comedy-dramas, hoping to re-impress moviegoers with his aloof leading-man charm and faux-natural, trying-too-hard-to-be-funny dialogue.

A powerhouse soundtrack–with the songs deployed slyly, as comment and foreshadowing–and a stunning ending balance the copious nudity and slapstick raunch which have led some to dismiss The Last American Virgin as distasteful. Really, the film's frankness makes it more honest than its dreamy-eyed descendants; even the shallow treatment of girls captures the point of view of a luckless teenage boy.

Though the movie lacks a strong central story, screenwriter Simon Allen and director Toby Meakins have come up with a genuinely clever concept that could be repeatable in multiple sequels — provided that the first wave of Netflix viewers aren’t too put off by the film’s many gross-out moments.

Nothing in the story really sticks, or stings. The ace cast makes the movie better. But they deserved a better movie.

It's a straightforward, relatively style-free piece, primarily of interest to those who want to hear Zizek's pronouncements. But what distinguishes the film is Zizek's peculiar self-awareness, which borders on paranoia

An uneven but often energizing remake of David Cronenberg’s 1977 cult classic.

The movie is too ponderous and dry — neither endearingly trashy nor effectively scary.

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

So long as Sorry, Haters stays ambiguous and sticks to long, winding conversations between Penn and Kechiche, the movie rolls along and builds momentum.

Hawco and Gaitán are gifted enough actors to give a dialogue-heavy movie some layers and dynamism; and Beltrán and Pitts throw some intense challenges at their heroes, including bad weather, a poisonous snake and a terrifying corpse.

The movie is also a strong spotlight for Salazar, a consistently fascinating and magnetic actress whose funny, warmhearted and ultimately inscrutable Maria represents the potential for meaningful human connection always just beyond Harrison’s reach.

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.

This is an inspiring and important story, but worthiness doesn't automatically equal quality. Had Besson looked for unexpected ways into Suu Kyi's life, or even had he indulged his old impulses and made a slick, surface-y Luc Besson movie, then The Lady might've been more memorable.

Thanks to tight direction by Brian Goodman and lively performances from Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the film’s engaging even when it’s ridiculous.

While the actors are game, their characters are awfully generic.

Ultimately, this is a movie with real personality, about a man coming to realize with no small amazement that he has an actual legacy to pass on — even if it’s a grim one.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

From the occasional flashy camera angles to a soundtrack peppered with deep-cut R&B songs, this movie slots right into some well-worn grooves. And yet it mostly works, thanks to an ace cast and a story that springs a few surprises.

While Retribution is far from Neeson’s best, it still mostly works, so long as you tune out the dialogue and focus on the hero’s twitchy face, waiting to see which will blow to smithereens first: his car or his patience.

Veteran action director Louis Leterrier delivers exactly what audiences expect: some banter, a couple of surprise plot twists and a few thrills. He does so more than capably, with two sequences in particular.

Writer-director Akash Sherman gives the film a handsome look, and gets two strong lead performances, but his picture still comes out too static and somber.

A few memorable shots don’t offer enough justification to watch a film that’s not scary, rarely exciting and never as engrossing a puzzle as it means to be.

What Wingard has delivered is a fitfully entertaining, clearly compromised hybrid of action, horror and science-fiction.

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

Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.

Granted, there’s not much reason to watch this Whisky Galore! so long as the 1949 version still exists. But it’s clear that everyone involved with this production had genuine affection for the material and for the very idea of old Scotland as a genteel utopia populated by kindly tippler

The dialogue is blunt, and the plot overly centers white heroism; but the period detail is well-observed, and the filmmakers show a real understanding of the ingrained attitudes and anxieties that make moments of social progress so difficult.

The Locksmith screenplay (credited to five people, none of whom are Harvard) doesn’t have the snappy dialogue of the best noirs; but its storytelling is efficient, with enough characters to make its world feel well-populated but not overstuffed.

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.

Christopher delivers cutesy jabber and one-note characters, as oily and devoid of substance as... well, you know.

Reilly's appearance in Piggie amounts to little more than a cameo, but he's lively and real in ways that the rest of Bagnall's cast is not. It's the material's fault.

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.

Watts is plenty convincing as someone well past the brink of a psychotic break, but The Wolf Hour takes too long to get properly cranked up. This movie is mostly just mood-setting, with much more going on in the background than the foreground.

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

With an all-star cast that includes Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Adam Goldberg and Clifton Collins Jr. — many of whom ham it up in kooky ways — this movie is enjoyably energetic. It almost doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Deepens as it plays out, and rewards viewers who stick with it through the clumsier passages. The film is moving and thought-provoking.

An otherwise plain action picture carried by strong performances and a mildly compelling mystery.

There are certainly worse ways to spend the holiday season than in the company of two charming old actors, being reminded that human companionship makes life worth living, even as it makes dying a little tougher.

Cold Turkey is well-acted, and at times even well-observed, but about 20 minutes of the material actually matters, and the rest is mere putter.

Refreshingly dark and sick, this is a movie for those who like cinematic monsters that hit so hard they leave a mark.

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.

Strong lead performances and a startling twist juice up the found-footage exercise VooDoo, which squeezes unexpected novelty from an exhausted subgenre.

While Beauty doesn’t really work, it does fail in interesting ways.

This new Bel Ami has a lot to recommend it, but it never seems as artful or smart as "Dangerous Liaisons," the film it most resembles.

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 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.

Danny McBride is at his funniest and scariest in Arizona, a darkly comic film noir that works well as both a violent thriller and as a ruthless satire of over-extended American dreamers.

All the nudity in Zerophilia is either prosthetic or body-doubled. Which means the sex scenes--and the feeling and meaning behind them--are just as phony.

What Student Bodies lacks in incisiveness—and laughs, frankly—it makes up in gusto. The advantage of having a creative team drawn from middle-aged pros with decades of industry experience is that they knew how to put together a picture teeming with ideas and shot through with energy.

The Lair doesn’t finish as spectacularly as it starts; but that just means it’s a good genre picture and not a great one.

This isn't really a movie made for audiences; it's for casting agents and studio execs, to show off one man's acting chops and his skill at writing dialogue.

What's most surprising about Never Been Thawed is that it's not completely awful. It's just a little awful.

Both Kong and Mechani-Kong look unimpressive, with none of the weird grandeur of the classic Japanese kaiju.

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.

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 documentary was shot on film, and Moormann's snappy editing and subtly moving camera match the energy of the jump-blues and roots-rock that Dowd loved.

For those willing to stretch a little to connect with Ferrara, Padre Pio is often as rewarding as it is challenging.

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

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.

This is not a “fun” horror picture. It’s about miseries both supernatural and mundane. And, yes, it’s scary. Pesce’s art-film roots are evident in the movie’s slow-burn first hour. But in the final third, The Grudge piles on the explicit gore and jump scares — all leading to a final scene and final shot as terrifying as anything in the original series.

The overall mood is warm and cheery, and Lohan brings a spontaneous sincerity to even the corniest scenes. The movie’s wrapping is shiny and plastic, but its star quality is genuine.

The third film has way too many moments that push too far toward the absurd.

As a slick, over-the-top action picture, Anna works splendidly. It features multiple jaw-dropping set-pieces, including a restaurant hit where Anna walks in with an unloaded gun and walks out after killing about a dozen thugs. The plot, while fairly predictable, is at least craftily constructed. On its own merits, this is one rollickingly entertaining film, that under ordinary circumstances Besson fans would adore.

This movie ultimately lacks the characters and imagination to make it anything more than a passable entertainment.

It began a transition in the series away from horror and toward kid-friendly adventure.

Maniac Cop is heavier on the goofery than the relevance.

Cox’s character is a living, hissing embodiment of the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. As an actor stuck in a movie that wastes his talents, Cox can surely relate.

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.

At its best, Nightbreed is like a living version of a coffee-table book, with each page filled with tentacled, quilled, or moon-faced monsters.

Throughout, Gaffigan is great, eschewing sentimentality as he taps into his frustration and rage — with no jokes in sight.

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.

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

Message from the King isn’t a chore to watch by any means; and there are moments that suggest the more colorful neo-noir that might’ve been.

Ultimately, this film has a memorable villain and a stunning location, and not much else.

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.

The bloodiest of the Apes films, and one of the most despairing.

While Mollner elicits some strong performances — especially from Francesca Eastwood as a vengeful farmer’s daughter — Outlaws and Angels can’t overcome its distractingly showy camera moves or its tendency toward scenes that drag on interminably.

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.

While trying to make the original’s free-flowing, frequently surprising plot fit into a more conventional screenplay arc, Barris and Hall have sapped a lot of its vitality. The new version may be more current, but the old one rings more true.

Even the movie's brighter spots are undermined by ineptly staged action sequences, flatly functional dialogue and stock characters. Ultimately, Submerged is all wet.

The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.

Leatherface is well-made pulp, not a masterpiece like Hooper’s original. But given what this character means to horror history — and how badly he’s been treated — any upgrade’s a gift.

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.

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.

Right up until the quake, Aftershock is a bland, sub-"Hangover" comedy about guys on the make in South America. Then finally, blessedly, the ground swallows up these shallow idiots.

After an hour or so of bad noir dialogue and convoluted plotting, viewers may wish they could jump back in time and watch something else.

At both its highest and its lowest, Inherit the Viper lacks excitement. The action sequences are sparse, and the plot is underdeveloped.

The Wraith’s plot is predictable and its genre nods skimpy (primarily limited to The Mystery Racer’s ability to resurrect himself after crashes), but Marvin directs with real energy and wit.

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.

There’s nothing particularly awful about the film (title aside), but it never develops into the “Shaun of the Dead”-like social satire it strains to be.

Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

Garcia and Prinze are so likable that it’s satisfying to see them spend an hour or so of screen time figuring out what the audience knows right away.

While the story’s nothing special, the world of Desolate is memorable, with its tribal rivalries and sleazy black markets. It’s a vision of the end-times that disturbingly resembles the dying small towns of America in 2019.

The movie doesn't do justice to a promising premise. A scarcity of laughs and scares limits this property's curb appeal.

This movie is mostly just another brisk recounting of a much-scrutinized actor’s tragic life, coupled with some unconvincing and often confusing coverage of the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death. The results feel tawdry and shallow.

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.

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

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

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.

In nearly every way—from how the movie’s being released to the way it approaches the whole satanic possession subgenre — The Vatican Tapes is dispiritingly ordinary. It’s the rote B-movie that Neveldine up to now has tried so hard not to make.

Nothing about The Ward's script or direction has much snap. The dialogue is never witty, the characters are indistinct, the story is set in 1966 for no relevant reason, and the scares are strictly of the "thing jumps loudly out of the shadows" variety.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.

Ridiculousness aside, though, Brake is reasonably impressive both as a performance piece and as an exercise in staging.

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.”

The elements of a good, “Winter’s Bone”-like depiction of the rural social order are here. But they only really coalesce — and combust — when Thornton’s on the screen.

The Lodgers isn't especially frightening, but as the story of people weighed down by their legacies, it is genuinely haunting.

Strong lead performances by Aaron Paul and Emily Ratajkowski are squandered in Welcome Home, a low-tension suspense picture with pretensions of saying something profound about broken relationships.

King worked on the script for Cell, which isn’t that surprising given that many of the worst adaptations of his work have his name on them. It only proves how hard a job it is to adapt King. Even the author himself can’t ace it.

The surrealism that dominates so much of Mr. Jones’ final stretch is admirably unusual, but it’s also confusing, and quickly becomes tedious.

Psychopaths is too random, too kitschy — too immature.

While Moussi has ample skills as a fighter — and is plenty handsome to boot — he lacks Van Damme’s charisma. It turns out that just slapping the title “Kickboxer” onto a movie isn’t enough to revive a B-movie favorite. The actual kickboxer matters.

Granted, it’s all pretty stimulating. But when the jolts subside, there’s not much for viewers to cling to, to steady themselves.

Forever Strong is generic faith-and-redemption fare, devoid of nuance.

Looks and sounds better than the average indie film debut.

The Secret Scripture is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it.

In the process of becoming characters, the writer-stars have diminished themselves.

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.

Hoge, who scripted and directed The United States Of Leland, caters to his cast too much. He gives almost every character a way-too-involved subplot, which distracts from the heart of his story.

The book may have been too unwieldy for Roos to wrangle. There's a lot of story (and backstory) here, which Roos tries to squeeze in every which way.

The movie's more damnable problem is it irrelevance.

Would the movie be as (barely) entertaining as it is without De Niro? He only has about 15 minutes’ worth of scenes in Heist, but whenever he’s on-screen the film almost feels legitimate.

Roughly 99 percent of the time, if a movie that seems like it should be a big deal appears almost out of the blue, it's because it's lousy. The Double doesn't exactly buck that trend.

This is a stifling film about solipsistic people.

No situation or character really gets a chance to breathe or grow here. Even the best casts can flail when the vibe is more antic than comic.

Daughter of the Wolf could’ve used a jaw-dropping set-piece or two (or three or four), but Hackl does at least embrace the challenge of shooting outside in the cold, and the movie’s moderately better for it.

It isn't exactly a waste of time, but anyone who's seen a mob movie or TV show in the past 30 years has pretty much seen 10th & Wolf.

Unlike most rock docs, “Life in 12 Bars” isn’t a look back from a distance. It’s like living through one man’s pain.

The plot of Solace is ultimately too generic — and too silly — to take seriously, which is probably why the film’s taken so long to come out. But it has style, and throwback appeal.

This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.

Red Lights' setup is silly but fun, with a fair degree of self-awareness that the film's entire "super-scientists vs. celebrity spiritualists" premise is a hoot.

At one point, David Cross tells Gurwitch to enjoy being unemployed, because "When you're fired, you're interesting." But as Fired! proves, that ain't necessarily so.

None of this amounts to much. The original had some squirmy points to make about femininity and motherhood that this Inside lacks. But the movie works on a gut level … as in, "Sharp blades are scary when they're pointed at a pregnant belly."

While the art world caricatures are hardly fresh, there’s a lot about Velvet Buzzsaw that’s pretty savvy and even inspired.

Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.

Any straight-to-video horror hack could’ve made The Guardian, which has almost no energy until its last 15 minutes, and never exhibits the command of visual storytelling that should be expected from the director of The French Connection and Sorcerer.

Camera Obscura lurches between gory thriller sequences and dreary character development, and never develops any momentum. The movie gets in its own way — burdened with meaning.

It’s unusual to see a film like this make its nominal hero into a jerk, who learns something essential from his nemesis. True or not, the complex characterization does make for a better story.

Salvation Boulevard doesn't seem to have any higher aspiration than illustrating how religious people can be hypocrites. (Gosh, who knew?)

It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.

There are talented people up and down the One True Loves cast and crew list, so it really makes no sense that director Andy Fickman’s film is so off-key. Nearly every creative choice goes awry.

Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.

The characters Lehmann and company use as generational mouthpieces bear no relation to any people who have ever existed, and they barely work as parody.

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

The Rob Zombie brand promises hard-core horror and scuzzy atmosphere, and “31” delivers just that. Even on autopilot, Zombie makes movies that hit hard and leave a stain.

The effect is like watching a bar band do a cover version of “The Amityville Horror” — spirited enough, but hardly ready for the big time.

Happy Tears is a complete mess of a movie, but Lichtenstein conjures some sweet moments and striking metaphors.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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