Noel Murray

"Gehenna" features impressive gore effects, but the plot's an uninspired hodgepodge of dozens of other "haunted structure" pictures, set at a plodding pace, in a gray, dim location. It peaks in its first five minutes. The remaining 100 go nowhere, slowly.

The 12th Man is a polished crowd-pleaser, with a timeless message: Nazis suck.

Racer and the Jailbird remains absorbing throughout, thanks primarily to the two leads, who are both almost frighteningly believable as lovers willing to risk everything to stay together.

As the name suggests, Modern Life Is Rubbish romanticizes analog relationships — and is meant for anyone who does the same.

While The Escape of Prisoner 614 has the right cast for a good old-fashioned romp, this movie barely moves.

The Rachel Divide never quite cracks Dolezal's facade (if it even is a facade). But Brownson does move beyond the "think-piece" take on a real person — while also questioning whether she should.

Like the films it pays homage to, Ghost Stories is more classy than chilling; but each of its dark, twisty tales is smartly staged.

Writer-director-star Brian Gianci keeps a snappy pace, and his cast is admirably willing to take chances, but when the humor doesn't land — which is most of the time — the movie's tough to take.

Ignore the nondescript title; writer-director Jeff Houkal's backwoods horror film Edge of Isolation has personality and just enough splatter to satisfy gore-hounds. The plot's a rehash of '70s/'80s drive-in classics like "The Hills Have Eyes," but this movie has its own odd energy and is effectively icky.

The scenery's pleasant and the actors are mostly likable. If "Baja" had been made in the '60s, it would have some kitsch appeal. It's easy watching, for anyone who needs a little mind-vacation. Everyone else should consider burying it in a hole for the next 50 years.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

Böhm doesn't do so well with Wildling's scare scenes and gore, because he seems more focused on making a coming-of-age character study than an effective fright-flick. But he has one remarkable character in Anna, who's played by Powley as a feral gal with a heartbreakingly doleful soul.

hough the first half of the picture is adequately tense and well-made, it's not strikingly cinematic or engagingly mysterious enough to justify the stalling. Or maybe the problem is that 10x10 takes too long to let Evans and Reilly off the leash.

The movie is breezy to a fault. The interviewees are focused and articulate, but aren’t given time to cover more than the basics. Anyone who’s already been following the ongoing conversations about the future of AI won’t learn much new.

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

The tangled plot is ultimately too simple, and the film's sociopolitical commentary too paltry. But Lowlife does have a refreshingly varied and up-to-date cast of characters. With seedy B-movies, just a little bit of ambition elevates the generic.

God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, directed by Michael Mason, is less strident than the two surprise hits that preceded it, but it still tells a programmatic story, rooted in presumptions.

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

Unfortunately, there's not enough footage of Wallace playing; and in an effort to squeeze in as many voices as possible, "Triumph" suffers from some repetition of anecdotes and ideas. But the details of what Wallace went through are astonishing, and important to revisit.

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

Pyewacket's payoff is a bit too meager given the creepy build-up. But as a psychodrama about a troubled mother and daughter, this movie is gripping from start to finish. Like a lot of the best horror, it's about the hells people conjure for themselves.

Turning this movie off before it starts is actually a good idea: not because it's dangerous, but because it's lousy.

While there's only 25 minutes of good material strewn throughout a movie four times that length, Apartment 212 squeaks by thanks to its cast.

Some viewers may find Joe's stressors too negligible; and honestly, Tilt is too shapeless and esoteric to be great. It flags considerably after its first hour, stumbling toward a frustrating ending. Still, there's a frankness to this picture that compensates for the overall slightness. It's the rare thriller that looks to combine "Five Easy Pieces" and "Taxi Driver."

The gimmicky structure and style is more distracting than effective, and it mostly fails to compensate for an underdeveloped plot.

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.

This movie remains subtle throughout, emphasizing the tenuousness of reality and the unmooring isolation of the bush.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

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.

Mohawk is a gripping and despairing action picture, about how we can't seem to stop trying to destroy those we distrust — including ourselves.

Director Noh Dong-seok — working from a Kôtarô Isaka novel — fills the film with rich detail, helping this "innocent man, wrongly accused" story overcome its dogged conventionality.

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

Writer-director Derek Nguyen's supernatural thriller settles confidently in a place between classy and trashy.

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

The Monkey King 3 is more about eye-popping spectacle than narrative sweep, but it's generous with images that make audiences go, "Oooh!"

There's nothing all that original about Still/Born. But it's sharp and shocking, and parents especially should appreciate how it turns caring for a screeching newborn into an inescapable nightmare.

González maintains a glacial pace and a hushed tone, while withholding so much information that the film is confusing and only comes together in retrospect. It's a grueling experience, with a modest payoff. By the time it finally ends, every word in its title feels apt.

Even at its most confounding, this is a challenging and entertaining film, delivering suspense and drama even as it's asking if it should.

Ultimately, Wastelander is a movie for fetishists, who likely won't care about the emptiness at its center so long as its surfaces are as smothered with cheese as the straight-to-VHS junk they loved as a kid.

Writer-director Brian A. Metcalf avoids the usual found-footage looseness, instead relying on scripted dialogue and professional actors (including former child star Thomas Ian Nicholas, who also produced). The cast is strong but their lines are painfully stilted.

The comic incongruity of doting parents stalking children becomes less funny over time; and often it feels like Taylor hasn’t thought through the particulars of his premise, or the places he could’ve taken it.

The apparitions are cool. The schmoes they’re haunting hardly seem worth the effort.

The Midnight Man would feel like a hodgepodge of other fright flicks even without England and Shaye’s familiar faces.

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."

It's all a tad too serious for a movie that's essentially a tawdry pulp thriller. Still, anyone who comes to Acts of Violence looking for colorfully sleazy characters and shootouts — as opposed to nuanced public policy briefs — should find enough reasons to stick around.

The sense of place and character in this film is handled so adroitly that whenever the plot comes blundering back in it’s a distraction — but never one that totally kills the movie.

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

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

“A Portrait” may not make Frisell’s biography fascinating, but it does give the proper due to a guitarist whose music flows like water into any handy vessel.

Movies like these — so well-intentioned, so unexciting — give the very notion of “a brainy thriller” a bad rep.

This movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last.

There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.

Like “Winter’s Bone,” the film is at its best when it follows its heroine closely, letting the audience understand more about her life with each step closer to danger.

Darkest Hour dwells at a very particular point between “exaggerated for dramatic effect” and “how it really was.” The star embraces the challenge of that tricky balance, simultaneously playing a cartoon and a person.

Looking for bathroom humor, beer jokes, heavy metal, unapologetic smut and a dude in a furry monster suit? These movies are a one-stop shop for just that kind of good-natured vulgarity.

Psychopaths is too random, too kitschy — too immature.

The movie isn’t trying to understand Chicago in the Capone era. It just uses those names and stories as a backdrop for a lot of shooting, swearing and bad accents.

Hopkins and company don’t bring much special or personal to the material. The plot’s predictable and the shocks are routine in Slumber.

Dagg (who previously made the very good chase picture “River”) tries too hard to give the material a highbrow frame. The movie is dimly lighted and hushed to a fault. But the China brothers’ script is strong, and Dagg elicits terrific performances from Abbott, Bernthal and Poots.

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 lack of any real imagination makes Attack of the Killer Donuts a chore.

This is an alternately handsome and harrowing ghost story, about a civilized society haunted by its own unspeakable needs.

Axelsson relies too much on picturesque scenery and subtle dramatic performances to engage the audience whenever not much is happening.

Even at its most serious and sophisticated, it retains the pleasingly funky aroma of pulp.

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

Thanks to good performances by Cutmore-Scott and Simmons — and good writing by Chirchirillo — Bad Match effectively explores the everyday horror that comes from people treating their fellow human beings as interchangeable playthings.

Miike retains his twisted sense of humor, with mangling and disemboweling deployed for comic effect. And after 99 movies, he certainly knows how to make action memorable. When 300 brightly clad actors with sharp props come storming in for the story's climax, all a martial arts fan can do is sit back and salivate.

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.

Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill! is just dumb enough to be a potentially fun candidate for someone’s “bad movie night.”

The movie bleeds honesty, though its individual components are more memorable than how they’re assembled.

More detail about how this concert came to be — and what it means to both the performers and their patrons — would’ve made Liberation Day more illuminating, at least as a piece of journalism. But there’s a subtly meaningful power to what the film actually does.

When the long-promised global barrage of tornadoes, lightning strikes, tidal waves and extreme temperatures hits in the final half-hour, the special effects are stunning. But the razzle-dazzle arrives too late, and is strangely unmoving.

The subject matter of Deliver Us is sensational, but Di Giacomo’s approach is more in the spirit of documentarian Frederick Wiseman, where very little is explained.

The battle scenes here are impressively large-scale, but too sparsely deployed. A good two-thirds of this movie consists of miserable-looking people quietly debating their terrible options, which can be exhausting.

London is adequate (if not exactly magnetic) as the lead, and director Patricio Valladares gives the film a rich, shadowy look that almost compensates for the turgid pace and distractingly incessant score.

The movie’s central idea and bright young cast are so good that some of its shallowness is forgivable.

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.

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.

There’s barely enough plot here to fill a feature, but this energetic throwback’s DIY effects and general looniness should appeal to horror mavens.

Ai’s approach occasionally tips too far toward aestheticizing a dire situation.

Doleac’s forging a niche. His name on a picture is now an indication that genre fans will see something different … though it’s not yet a mark of quality.

A lifeless demonic possession drama.

From the shockingly raunchy dialogue to the ironic yuletide pop songs, this movie is a fun kind of nasty.

Still, even if The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson doesn’t wholly deliver on its premise, France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now.

It’s the same dreary hooey, made more tedious and witless through repetition.

Even with a solid cast at his disposal, Bieber can’t make Don’t Sleep anything more than a disconnected compendium of time-tested shock tactics.

McGowan is excellent in what she’s claimed will be her last acting role; and Christopher Lloyd is equally memorable as one of the lost souls the heroine encounters in Toronto’s labyrinthine underground.

Welcome to Willits has a loopy energy that in short spurts can be pretty amusing. More often than not though, the film is clever to a fault, packing in too many characters and gimmicks.

What makes Super Dark Times one of the most exciting American filmmaking debuts in recent years is how well Phillips and company grasp both the intensity and ephemerality of adolescence.

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.

These vignettes are only sporadically entertaining, and sap a lot of the narrative momentum before the extended climax — which itself is largely a retread of the first film’s big finish.

Burdge holds the picture together, playing a character who walks a fine line between being sympathetically damaged and terrifyingly loony.

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.

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.

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.

The Vault is a combination heist and horror picture; and it’s the rare genre mash-up where each element’s equally strong.

None of this makes a lick of sense, but it’s fascinatingly asinine. It feels wrong to encourage this kind of misbegotten DIY project, but if you’re a fan of the likes of “The Room” or “Birdemic,” honestly, you can’t miss “Mike Boy.”

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.

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.

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

Mostly, it’s a tightly constructed, unapologetically nasty little thriller, given depth and weight by Wallace’s interpretation of a sweet woman suffering for her past.

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.

While its DIY spirit is admirable, this tedious shocker feels like it was cobbled together from a kit.

While writer-director Megan Freels Johnston makes some unusual choices that set her film apart from run-of-the-mill low-budget horror, too much of her movie feels warmed-over.

Despite a few meta moments in which the characters comment on how their plight is like “a bad horror movie,” Bedeviled ultimately embraces clichés rather the subverting them. The evil technology’s up to date, but the storytelling’s too old-fashioned.

The film is a stirring salute to human ingenuity.

What this film is not, in any way, is comprehensive. Very intentionally, Folayan and company don’t concern themselves with the bigger picture. This is ground-level journalism.

There’s not enough story here but every time David pops up on the soundtrack to spout dime-novel clichés like, “Fear the hanged man, because he’s dead already,” this movie takes on the quality of classic storybook, not straight-to-video schlock.

The story suffers diminishing returns as it unwinds with increasing violence and absurdity. Or maybe it’s just that “68 Kill” puts the best material upfront.

Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy.

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.

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.

Watching an actress of Hunter’s caliber in a meaty leading role partly compensates for the creaky plot and overearnest tone.

Menashe Lustig brings warmth and a lumpen charisma to Menashe’s lead role, giving life to a film based in part on his own experiences.

The Gracefield Incident sports some impressive special effects in key scenes, but remains yet another found-footage thriller where the dialogue feels phony, the nonscary action is tedious and the images are artless. The angle may be different, but we’ve seen this before.

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.

While writer-director Tudley James has a disarmingly light touch and some stylistic flair, this “Granny” ultimately isn’t clever or funny enough.

The approach isn’t always satisfying. Some clips could use more setup, or even just a basic explanation.

Throughout the film, Maclean and Perkins toy with the ever-shifting layers of truth and fiction in a theater rehearsal. But they’re also using Catton’s book to comment on how school can sometimes be a poor preparation for life itself.

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.

First-time feature-director Jonathan Baker keeps the pace too slack and the tone too earnest — and sometimes fails to convey basic visual information about what’s happening.

Bronson playing another strong man who would prefer not to have to kick as many asses as circumstances demand. Bronson is Vince Majestyk, a Colorado melon farmer who stands up against a criminal syndicate and the local law when he hires migrant day laborers to bring in his crop, rather than using the local mob’s drunken goons.

Martin’s script—co-written with SNL producer Lorne Michaels and songwriter Randy Newman—is full of inspired bits of comic business, such as Martin making a “lookuphere!” bird call to get his chums’ attention, Chase pouring water all over his face while his mates’ canteens are dry, and the Amigos summoning an invisible swordsman whom Chase accidentally shoots.

Weet tries to invest a common horror premise with some original mythology, but unlike films that risk disturbing audiences by tying ghosts to abuse, Darkness Rising treats Madison’s past more as a puzzle to be solved, which drains it of some primal power.

Banzai is an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.

It’s an approach that works well when the audience enjoys the company of this person who’s become a permanent fixture on their TV. But it’s also one that enrages opposing voters, who can only ever see the maddening fakery.

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?

It’s almost as though Combs knows his public image remains fuzzy, caught among such labels as “mogul,” “criminal,” “sellout,” and “under-appreciated genius.” Consider this movie a purposeful step toward cementing a legacy.

Thanks to three lively lead performances and smart storytelling choices, what could have been a distasteful premise becomes surprisingly entertaining.

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

Even when the movie shades too far into the oblique or the obvious, its evocative scenes of urban life and Tobin’s powerful performance provide ample compensation. Plot twists or no, this is a vivid depiction of a lost soul.

The costars have good chemistry and bring a sense of desperation to their roles that animates a thin plot.

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.

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.

This isn’t the kind of genre piece that everyone will warm to. Some might find the subject matter too bleak; others might wish it were pulpier. But on the whole, Berlin Syndrome is incredibly effective, while offering a perspective that these kinds of films usually lack. It gets to know the innocent, while rendering the evil banal.

The brilliance of Long Strange Trip is that Bar-Lev allows for multiple interpretations.

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.

Violet never progresses. It’s just one long, slow wallow. That said, Devos and cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis devise so many striking images that the movie is always a pleasure to watch.

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

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

What matters most is that “Bang!” is filled with lively anecdotes about the days when hucksters and racketeers ran the music business, jostling for control — an art in and of itself.

From start to finish, Black Rose is about as pro forma as a motion picture gets.

The Black Room is unabashedly trashy — with scene after scene of nudity and gore — but doesn’t offer much beyond sensation.

When “Chasing Trane” serves up mesmerizing footage of Coltrane lost in the middle of a long solo, the film communicates something beyond words.

By showing the exhausting diligence that goes into moments of pure transcendent joy onstage, this doc should make new fans for Giordano’s living museum.

The cast is game and the pace blessedly zippy, but everything about this film feels too fake to generate any real suspense.

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 Eyes is a talky, set-bound drama masquerading as a suspense picture, and nearly the entire movie consists of overwritten, overacted, visually inert confrontations and monologues.

Few horror fans will complain about a movie that’s so generous with well-constructed, energetically staged set pieces featuring elaborate makeup effects and plenty of nondigital goo. The Void is derivative, but delightful.

James Cullen Bressack’s Bethany is polished, well-acted and filled with memorably disgusting images, but its portrait of a frazzled adult survivor of child abuse is ultimately formulaic and a little sleazy.

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.

Forced character arc aside though, this is a tightly constructed and well acted indie with a few standout sequences. It’s further proof that sometimes all a filmmaker needs is a cab and a camera.

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

Eventually, The Blackcoat’s Daughter connects the pieces and ends strongly, though Perkins smartly spends more creative energy on crafting creepy situations than on pointing toward the payoff.

There’s a lived-in quality to Dig Two Graves that’s all-too-rare for low-budget movies in this genre.

While the plot is skimpy, the performances are rich, which turns Prevenge into a series of satirical sketches, dissecting the social dynamics between a mother-to-be and the various men and women who think they have an advantage over her.

What makes The Devil’s Candy a standout is how well-developed these characters are.... More importantly, Byrne is as skilled as ever at constructing sequences at once bizarre, suspenseful and oddly beautiful.

Rat Film doesn’t really make an impassioned political statement. Instead, Anthony assembles striking, allusive pictures and sounds into a one-of-a-kind experience, meant to provoke thought.

As he uses Rathbun’s old tactics against his observers, Theroux raises troubling questions about psychological warfare and how devoutness shades into fanaticism.

Even when Don’t Kill It veers toward the ordinary, Lundgren is there with his lived-in face and playful eyes, waiting as ever to spring into action. It’s great to see him in a fun movie again.

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 action sequences are strong, with spectacular crashes and explosions, dynamic camera moves and tight cuts that at times give the film an appealing breathlessness. But the cast takes a too-lax approach to this material.

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

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

Plenty of first-time feature filmmakers have combined grubby genre kicks with more personal concerns; but there’s a confidence and energy to “Stray Bullets” that compensates for the rather rudimentary, over-familiar story.

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.

With Eloise, Legato and company take a prime location, rich in history, and make it look like a soundstage.

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

Kopple and her team have combed through the hours and hours of those dispatches that Gigi has sent into the world, and from them they’ve pieced together a story very much worth telling.

At it’s best, Newness is about how nothing’s really all that new.

Rosefeldt’s visual panache and Blanchett’s astonishing versatility bring cinematic verve to something that could’ve easily come off as too dryly conceptual.

Only a filmmaker as talented as Alex Ross Perry could make a movie as misbegotten as Golden Exits.

Both of Kelly’s movies so far have shown the same strengths and weaknesses. He has an emotionally distant, observational approach, which makes the most outlandish behavior seem grounded and plausible, but which also makes moments of passion and confrontation come off a little flat.

This Wilson is sweet and pleasant and occasionally riotously funny. But it’s still the simplified version of a much more complicated work of art.

Sheridan pares his story and characters down to their barest essentials, making a movie that comes off sometimes as slight, but which ultimately delivers the goods for those who like smart takes on life-or-death macho adventure.

Even if The Little Hours never becomes a knee-slapper, it’s consistently entertaining…kind of like a laid-back, stretched-out Monty Python sketch.

Unlike “Obvious Child,” Landline plays like a series of semi-successful comic and dramatic scenes, haphazardly arranged into something resembling a story.

[Morgan's] observations about Hollywood’s image-consciousness and the transactional nature of L.A. relationships are nothing new. But there’s a specificity and a liveliness to her jokes that makes them feel almost fresh — or, at the least, relevant.

A Ghost Story has the structure and rhythm of a musical suite, with Lowry working variations on the same themes, the same characters, and the same location. The result can be lyrical and poetic, or more naturalistic and minimalist. In both cases, A Ghost Story is absolutely mesmerizing, with an anything-goes quality that’s endlessly fascinating.

There’s a certain flat indie artlessness to “The Big Sick,” but it’d be shortsighted to discount how well-written and well-acted it is. This is a very funny movie, yet always plausibly so—never throwing in jokes just for the sake of a laugh.

The Axe Murders of Villisca never really comes to much, perhaps because its focus is too diffuse. The scares are low, and the plot under-baked.

What distinguishes Starless Dreams is Oskouei’s voice, heard from off screen, getting these girls to be honest about where they’ve come from and why they’re less than anxious to return.

Writer-director C.A. Cooper’s The Snare is admirably artful and oblique in putting its own twist on the haunted-house story, but it’s derivative of much better psychological suspense films and is obnoxiously unpleasant to boot.

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

Until the thought-provoking, from-left-field twist ending, We Are the Flesh mostly seems like a series of sick tableaux, dredged up from the director’s subconscious and then splattered across the screen. But there’s genuine artistry even to this film’s most exploitative moments.

Director/co-writer Glenn Douglas Packard tries to bring a little style and color to the film by relying on off-kilter camera angles and cartoonish supporting characters. But he mostly stays within the narrow parameters of the “knocking off generically attractive youngsters one-by-one” movie, never getting campy enough, bizarre enough or satirical enough.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is sometimes too low-key, favoring spooky atmosphere and slow-drip storytelling over visceral kicks. But as an acting showcase, the film’s a winner, getting plenty of juice from the performances of two reliable pros.

The craft of the film is undeniable. The artistry is subtler and perhaps harder to perceive. But it’s there, lurking in the dark, waiting to rise up when least expected.

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

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.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (best-known for their Terry Gilliam behind-the-scenes docs Lost In La Mancha and The Hamster Factor) have made The Bad Kids in the “fly on the wall” mold of Frederick Wiseman, crossed with the “year-in-the-life” storytelling of Hoop Dreams. The structure of Black Rock itself is one of their biggest narrative assets.

It’s hard to recommend Blood Brothers, which is mostly unpleasant and shrill. But it is unusual enough to suggest that Prendes’ next film might be better.

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

Beyond the Gates is more imaginative than frightening, and Stewart and co-writer Stephen Scarlata take too long to get to the good parts, killing time with long dialogue scenes where the characters pause interminably between lines.

While the subject matter is difficult, the documentary itself is easy to watch and exciting to grapple with. Its biggest strengths are Jackson’s voice and Baldwin’s commentary, which combine to create a distinctively world-weary tone.

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.

For the most part this is a clever and confident expansion of a terrific short. It stings less but packs plenty of poison.

The emotional reserve of 66 Days can make the film feel a little dry at times, given that it’s about something as visceral as a man starving himself to death. But Byrne does a fine job of juggling a lot of information.

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.

Mifune: The Last Samurai is less a comprehensive overview of the actor’s life than it is an analysis of what that life meant.

The hyper-dramatic touches help disguise that this is essentially a film about paperwork. The rest of the weight is carried by Fan, who’s funny and heartbreaking. She’s a hero for our times: a stubborn woman, willing to inconvenience the powerful to get a fair hearing.

Life on the Line traffics in piled-on, predictable melodrama, with only intermittent sparks.

The Red Turtle nevertheless remains throughout a simple, gripping story of survival, deriving its sense of adventure from the most basic plot imaginable: Here’s a human being, stranded in a strange place, using his strength, intelligence, and courage to forge some kind of a life for himself.

A short running time and an amiable tone kept Uncle Kent from ever becoming a chore, but aside from one hilariously awkward ménage à trois scene and a poignant final shot, the film was so slight that it almost dared the audience to get anything out of watching.

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

Director Mario Van Peebles brings real tension and excitement to the scenes where these men are surrounded by predators, but the tone of the film is awkwardly split between the grit of modern cinema and the boisterous adventure of old Hollywood.

A terrific cast...helps create a vivid world, on the fringes of showbiz. But Schwartzman’s observations about music and money mostly stay locked in his head. Dreamland isn’t hard to understand by any means, but it does seem fairly negligible from moment to moment. Neither the situation nor the stakes are exactly life or death.

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.

While the cast is talented and the tone is classy, The Charnel House never develops any momentum. The movie puts fright on the back burner to tease out a mystery that proves to be too profoundly idiotic to be worth all the bother.

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.

Mostly The Windmill is about watching some morally shaky people die horribly. But they do it with such dramatic gravitas that their inevitable eviscerations seem almost profound.

This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.

Mr. Donkey is deeply flawed but also fascinating. There’s a good story here, woven between the thudding jokes.

At times, I’m Not Ashamed is vivid enough to make one pine for a Christian-leaning teen flick that doesn’t have such a blunt, preordained ending.

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.

Creepy uses silence as a tool of terror, following its characters through long, tense scenes where everything’s a little too quiet, and where each creak sounds like a scream. The director has always excelled at making the ordinary seem unsettling.

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.

Timberlake himself is a stunner, whether he’s smoothly pirouetting his way through “Suit & Tie” or he’s choking back tears during his stirring set closer “Mirrors.” But his team is well-matched by Demme’s.

At its best, “Max Steel” shares elements with “Smallville” and “Teen Wolf,” using the supernatural as a metaphor for awkward adolescence. At its worst, it’s more like “Transformers” — an extended toy commercial, noisy and forgettable.

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

Maitland’s experimental approach to a tricky subject leaves viewers with a deeper understanding of a terrible moment in American history.

One of the ways this film feels fresh and revisionist is that it doesn’t succumb to “great man”-ism, positioning a famous artist’s genius as singular.

Given that gasp-inducing fireworks and light shows are the main reason why this film got made in the first place—and why people will want to watch it—it’s hard to fault Macdonald too much for opting more for uplift than provocation. After all, many artists begin with grand intentions, then settle for razzle-dazzle.

Though the plot’s too convoluted, the relentless pace and pungent atmosphere elevate the film above the typical grim crime stories soaked in blood and despair.

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.

More than any of the sequels, “Ravager” upholds the mind-bending originality and emotional depth of the first “Phantasm.” From the surprise cameos by old characters to the constant twisting of dreams and reality, it’s suffused with the feeling of people trying to regain control of their lives, to get back what they’ve lost.

The movie is first fascinating, then terrifying.

Malick seems to see everything on a cosmic and microscopic scale simultaneously. Drop him in the middle of a suburb and he’ll consider the magnificence of the children playing, the beauty of the grass, and the centuries it took for the rocks to form. That’s why it’s always going to be a rare gift to look at the world through his eyes — especially when he lets the images speak for themselves.

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.

Though more sensationalistic than serious, this film has a scale and an energy that rivals any Hollywood blockbuster.

What emerges is a rich portrait of one of 20th century pop culture’s great facilitators, whose keen observations, quirky personality and natural affinity for the outré helped greatness happen.

It tests the theory that a creepy clown lurking in the dark is always terrifying. It turns out that with repetition, some nightmares become boring.

It’s intense as hell, and a supreme example of how the morally repugnant can be made to look weirdly beautiful.

While it’s tricky to pin down exactly what Trespass Against Us means to be, it’s easy to enjoy what it actually is.

What is semi-interesting — in a “huh?” kind of way — is how the Ferraras take various paranoid speculation from the darkest reaches of the Internet and weave it all into a barely coherent super-theory.

The movie tries to wrap an important social message in comedy, but it’s unpalatable all the way through.

Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s snappy or relevant. In tech-speak, this film is bricked.

Audrie & Daisy could’ve done more to connect up the way the internet looms over both cases.... What the documentary does well, though, is critique a culture that allows young men to disregard other people’s humanity.

The charming, rousing WWII romance Their Finest is a film that openly stumps for two causes: the value of women in the workplace, and the power of cinema to tell stories that people need to hear.

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

This “emotionally immature braniac” character is funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. Carrie Pilby is special. “Carrie Pilby” is less so.

There’s something widely relatable about the way Barry tries to find somewhere to fit in, and preferably in a place where he can be himself and not somebody else’s symbol.

The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.

From the overwritten, pop-culture-reference-laden dialogue to the incessant attempts to be shocking, Happy Birthday tries way too hard. For a movie that doesn’t have much to say, it sure never stops jabbering.

Stone and his crew get the audience hooked on the mystery of this charismatic crank, and then take their time before they answer some of the bigger questions.

Had the movie been just a little more thought through, it could have been a new classic. Antibirth is still quite good, though, with memorably surreal imagery and an abrasive texture that enhances Perez’s overall vision. As a portrait of a middle America full of forgotten people and ruined civilizations, this is one of the year’s scariest movies.

The scenes that most linger in the mind are more like the one where the director confesses his complicated feelings about his father to another Spock, Zachary Quinto. It’s moving to know that even Nimoy’s son is as in thrall to an icon as the rest of us.

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.

Too much of this project feels like it’s been coldly calculated for maximum international box office.

Dull and drab, the film squanders an attractive young cast and a killer title.

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.

The jokes aren’t especially clever, and the story’s too cluttered, adding characters that range from an aloof poodle (with a French accent, naturally) to a blustery American monkey (no comment) to a cute alien.

Nearly every shot of Blood in the Water looks like it could be some band’s album cover. And when it comes to stylish crime pictures, appearance counts.

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.

Though the acting is inconsistent and the dialogue often laughable (and not in the good way), the film has an appealing can-do quality and a strong dose of craziness that keeps it from ever becoming boring.

As always with Greenwald, it’s refreshing that he doesn’t simply indulge in fear-mongering. He has the resources and the research team to sort through lots of data, culling the relevant points and encouraging action.

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

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.

When Two Worlds Collide employs a variety of styles and approaches to construct a single gripping narrative.

Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.

Luckily for Gibson fans, the movie’s a small gem: a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.

The movie sports more personality than most low-budget thrillers, yet sometimes devolves into the kind of ponderousness that a collaborator might have second-guessed.

The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.

Stories Women Tell does succeed at what it primarily means to do, which is to take abortion out of the realm of the theoretical and make it more personal.

Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.

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 film doesn’t always work as a genre exercise, but it’s a winner as a character study, in large part because of how committed Hagan is to playing Janie’s derangement. Casting directors in search of the offbeat should take note.

Although it’s casual to a fault, Dream Is Destiny is generally engaging and liberally sprinkled with real insights into what makes this filmmaker special.

After a strong start, Shelley becomes frustratingly vague in the middle, before rebounding with a finale that makes the implicit menace more explicit.

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.

The emphasis on Blackout’s therapeutic qualities gets overly repetitive and banal — a little like listening to strangers analyze their dreams. But like Blackout itself, The Blackout Experiments is often chilling and hard to shake.

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.

Even though it doesn’t all come together thrillingly, Phantom Boy garners a lot of goodwill just for looking and feeling original.

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.

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 truths revealed in this film have more to do with the North Korean government’s self-consciousness about how they’re perceived by foreigners. Here, they seem desperate to appear productive, congenial, devoted, and above all, happy.

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

On the list of Disney-related 2016 releases about child-rearing and handicaps, this one goes just above "Finding Dory." What it lacks in wacky hijinks, it makes up in hard truths.

This flavorless home-invasion thriller hasn’t ripened with age.