Noel Murray

The Phenom may be choppy, but it’s saying something sincere about how the pressure to be thought of as a winner can be an athlete’s most formidable opponent.

If there’s one major criticism to level at Eat That Question, it’s that Schütte too often satisfies fans of Zappa’s personality at the expense of those who prefer his music.

Ultimately, this isn’t a film about goat balls at all, but the willingness of millions to believe that some slick-talking demagogue knows more about what’s good for them and their families than someone with actual qualifications.

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

While it has a sharp hook — and is reasonably diverting — it never rises above the routine.

These are the kind of character- and plot-driven police procedurals designed for binging, a lot like Netflix favorites "Happy Valley" and "The Fall." Although each of the first three films tells a full, discrete story, they work best cumulatively, as the ongoing adventures of one cranky, conscientious cop.

Land And Shade is a slow-paced art-film, where the static shots are held at length and the characters pause between lines of dialogue, to give viewers plenty of chances to register the mood, look, feel, and significance of everything Acevedo shows.

A compendium of genre clichés — or, more charitably, “homages” — Queen of Spades offers little that fright fans haven’t seen before.

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

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

Too much of the film prioritizes the DJ’s problematic personal life over what made him famous. AM’s fans should get a lot out of the doc, but casual music-lovers may wish Kerslake would just get back to the party.

Without ever saying exactly what her heroine is thinking, Holmer captures a lot of what she’s feeling. And what Toni’s going through should be familiar to anyone who had an awkward puberty — which is to say, nearly everyone.

It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.

This tedious picture botches both the setup and the punchline.

This film barely brushes up against the many, many issues it raises, but those conversations can be had in the lobby, after the pleasure of watching an underappreciated artist finally get her due.

It’s hard to keep track of all the old high school comedies that writer-director-producer Sean Nalaboff nods to in his feature film debut, Hard Sell. Eventually, though, the movie finds its own voice and groove, and avoids being a mere retro exercise.

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

This film doesn’t lionize Weiner or justify anything he did. What it does is capture the frenzy of politics, the iron-clad egos of politicians, and the failure of the media to cover the parts of campaigning and government that actually matter.

Ma Ma’s corny simplicity makes its many flourishes look excessive, and even desperate.

While a film like Serial Killer 1 may disappoint anyone expecting “Bullitt” or “Lethal Weapon,” its focus on legwork and motivation could well appeal to fans of “Law & Order” — the TV show and the social construct.

The biggest problem with Most Likely to Die, though — beyond it being unimaginative, unfunny and frightless — is that it has no sense of place or time.

While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.

Mostly, just as “SPL” did with Yen, this sequel serves as an ideal showcase for talented martial artists. Kill Zone 2 watches with awe as Jaa and Wu move with balletic force. There’s grace within their violence.

Fans of blood and guts won’t find what they’re looking for here (until the final 10 minutes, that is); but serious-minded genre fans should feel satisfied.

[An] uninspired, nonsensical mishmash, which crudely cobbles together second-hand religious imagery, abrasively noisy jump-scares, and — for some reason — techno-phobia.

After an opening 10 minutes that promises something depressingly mediocre, the film takes a turn to the atmospheric and gruesome, and winds up being one of the year’s more provocative shockers.

Visually, Elstree 1976 is often striking, thanks to some haunting extreme close-ups of these actors’ Star Wars action figures.

For the many, many viewers who’ve never heard of Dream Alliance, Osmond’s documentary is edge-of-the-seat stuff.

Term Life is cleanly plotted and tautly paced, but it’s never as fun as it should be.

There are good lessons to be learned from the Market Basket saga. "We the People" doesn't trust the audience to figure them out for themselves.

While Our Last Tango is a little schematic overall, from moment to moment, it's beautifully choreographed.

The film mostly feels perfunctory and awkward — like calling home at Christmas.

Minimalist to a fault, this psychological horror exercise is fairly tedious, distinguished only by the moody lighting and the slow, fluid pans and dollies.

The languid pace and barnyard earthiness won't be to everybody's taste, but it's hard to deny Mascaro's vision. Where some look at a rodeo and see sweat and dirt, he sees a poignant struggle, which he illustrates meticulously.

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

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

Barbosa skillfully skewers the presumptions of rich folks who presume they deserve all that they've gotten, even as they're squandering it.

Even viewers who know nothing about soccer can enjoy how Rocha captures the beauty of a communal event through editing and shot selection alone.

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

Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell have often been the lone bright spot in otherwise dismal movies, and it takes their combined charm to redeem Mr. Right.

The main reason for anyone to see One More Time...is Walken, who brings a lot of life and fine shading to what could’ve been a one-note deadbeat dad type.

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

They Will Have to Kill Us First doesn't offer much of a primer on Mali's political or cultural histories — which is the movie's biggest weakness. But Schwartz did capture some remarkable footage of musicians who've spent the last few years taking tentative steps to reclaim what makes their nation special.

Baskin won't be for everybody, but it's well made and imaginatively upsetting.

By reducing Baker's story to just a couple of pivotal years, Budreau makes every moment matter, including a tense final scene that treats the preparation for a performance like a duel at high noon. Like Baker himself, Born to Be Blue finds drama in minimalism.

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

This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.

Make no mistake: This film is a tear-jerker, taking an intimate look at one family's heartbreak and how their art moves people.

While the film is well-acted and appealingly slick, the end result lacks novelty.

With just a few minor tweaks, Take Me To The River could play as a moody supernatural horror picture, with Logan as the dangerously curious hero being warned away from an evil he shouldn’t confront.

As Gabbert alternates [Gold's] monologues with long, gliding shots of funky supermarkets and old cinemas, she makes the point these aren’t disconnected aberrations in L.A. This is the city.

The grubby melodrama should appeal to adventurous moviegoers — and to the director’s small-but-fervent cult — but even that crowd should brace themselves for something slow-paced and opaque.

In the end, as with too many Gospel-derived dramas, The Young Messiah could’ve used less literalism, and more mystery.

Creative Control is funny and imaginative, where many films of this type are dispiritingly plain.

Those looking to learn more about Wong are in the wrong place. Those looking for a slick slugfest with memorable characters will be well satisfied.

For those who aren’t automatically turned off by the idea of an issue-doc that Schoolhouse Rock-ifies a serious, grown-up subject, Boom Bust Boom is a worthwhile way to spend an hour.

Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.

The rest of Emelie doesn’t live up to its peaks, through no fault of star Sarah Bolger, who makes a memorable villain.

Trapped is hit-and-miss as a piece of filmmaking but effective as an argument, contending not only that some Americans’ rights are being systematically taken away, but that when only a handful of organizations stand up for those rights, they become a bigger target.

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

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

Only Yesterday is animated, but rarely cartoony, in either its design or its storytelling.

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

At its best, Rolling Papers is like a paean to old-fashioned journalism, with its curious, intrepid writers — backed by well-heeled publishers — diligently finding and piecing-together important stories in the public interest. If Dickman had really wanted to be clever, he could’ve called this movie "Potlight."

Mavis! is maybe too short and too plain, but it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of great music. It's a fitting tribute to a true American original, belatedly getting her due.

[Reynor's] performance — fractured yet strong — is a big reason why Glassland works so well.

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

If Misconduct were more lurid — or more shamelessly idiotic — it might at least be a guilty pleasure. But instead it’s slow-paced, and the filmmakers’ idea of cheap thrills is to make Emily a masochist, who gets turned on by being spanked and slapped around.

What saves the movie is Solondz’s sensibility, which is still one-of-a-kind.

The movie holds to a steady but too-straight rhythm, hitting all the expected romantic-drama beats, right down to the occasional argument that threatens to stop the date cold. But Southside With You is also winningly sweet and earnest, and refreshingly frank about the problems that minorities face when they try to get ahead in a culture dominated by white males.

What makes Sing Street such a joyously entertaining film (besides the songs) is that it thinks the best of its characters, and it presents them the way they’d like to think of themselves.

The end result is awfully sketchy, more a collection of ideas and memories than a proper film.

Beckinsale’s performance is so funny in fact that it sucks a lot of the air out the room for her co-stars. Whenever she’s in a scene, she delivers so many pithy putdowns per second that it’s hard to pay attention to anyone else. And whenever she’s not around, the movie dims.

The beauty of Little Men — and of the director’s work in general — is that it displays a rare understanding of how the world works.

Although the original sometimes looked like a bunch of loosely connected scenes, this Rabid Dogs feels more purposeful.

The differences between Goat and a Very Special Episode of some Disney Channel sitcom are, at times, limited to the amount of on-screen puking. That said, Neel, Roberts, and Green do have a good feel for the vagaries of bro culture’s macho codes.

Marston and Sheppard have come up with a terrific premise, and have worked it into an often highly entertaining movie. But after a while, all the narrative ellipses and question marks start to feel like an affectation — beguiling on the surface, but un-genuine.

Is Christine voyeuristic, or even exploitative? Very possibly. But it’s also vivid, intense, and artful.

Though Certain Women is difficult, it’s hardly obtuse. And for those willing to trust that Reichardt is in full command of this material, “Certain Women” is utterly enthralling.

Manchester by the Sea is the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular for long stretches. And then, almost unexpectedly, it arrives.

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.

The movie feels like a thin excuse to show image after image of women being abused. This Martyrs has the bones of its predecessor, but it's been bled dry.

As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.

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

The 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 an element of parlor trickery here that the movie’s never entirely able to overcome.

Throughout Lamb, Laurence makes sure that every one of the character’s bad choices makes sense. That’s what makes the movie so sad.

The newly released Point Break remake is tedious and overblown — as though the filmmakers were so preoccupied with "updating" the material that they forgot what made it so popular in the first place.

He Never Died isn't as fleshed out as it could be, but what the film lacks in vivid supporting characters and rich plotting it gets back from Rollins, whose innate charisma carries the film.

Collectively, the mixed approaches illuminate a complicated man, at once spiritual and temperamental.

Extraction’s also not, by any stretch of the imagination, “good.” But at least it doesn’t waste everybody’s time.

When a documentary feels obliged to spend a few minutes explaining what “300 years” means, it crosses the line from simple and straightforward to condescending.

Testin and Berg's work here is definitely promising, suggesting something better from both of them down the road.

As with the movie as a whole, the message those scenes deliver is a heady mix of uplifting and devastating.

Dougherty's effects team is top-notch, and the movie takes unexpected chances with the style and the storytelling — including a beautiful stop-motion interlude.

While Whelan repeats his points too much, it remains gripping and maddening throughout to watch him run into stone walls.

The Letters feels dutiful, not artful.

Corbijn’s reserved, removed approach gives his stars the space to develop a real chemistry, which makes their characters pleasant company, once they get past their early clumsiness around each other.

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

Whenever the story starts to drag, Berg cuts to a scene like Big Brother’s era-defining performance of “Ball And Chain” at Monterey, which had even Los Angeles’ prematurely jaded rock superstars gaping in justified awe. They knew they were watching something explosive, in a package too fragile to contain it.

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

There’s a specificity to Mediterranea that at times makes it feel like an actual documentary.

When the two Krays are in the same room, circling each other with a mix of fraternal affection and deep loathing, Legend is as heady and unforgettable as it means to be. The rest of the time, it’s a movie with a lot of good points, but no connecting line.

Aggressively ugly and gross, the movie boasts a certain low-rent authenticity, but the auteur never figures out how to fill his grubby little rooms.

Honestly, The Funhouse Massacre isn't quite enough of either.

This backwoods monster movie boasts compelling performances, eye-catching creatures and an effective blend of practical and digital effects.

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.

So James White’s title character is an entitled, self-centered a--hole. But the movie about him is still a marvel: an honest, moving, and occasionally even funny portrait of what happens when a cripplingly immature young man gets hit with one reality check after another.

Aside from a few good jump-scares and a couple of original plot twists, Wrecker spends most of its running time cutting between footage of the roadster and footage of the truck, apparently assuming viewers will take those images and use them to imagine something more exciting.

It’s not easy to make a movie as beautiful as Brooklyn, where the stakes are low but the outcome really matters. This is an old-fashioned entertainment, but one so masterfully crafted and heartfelt that it’s hard not to love.

There’s a rigidity of purpose here that keeps A Nazi Legacy from ever becoming startling or revelatory.

The aim here seems to be to replace startled gasps with shocked guffaws. The results are contrary to Scout Law — not Kind, Clean or Reverent.

The main reason to see The Armor Of Light is to spend more time with Schenck, and to get a sense of how deeply he’s thought about all of this.

At its most basic level, the Paranormal Activity formula still has some kick, with its combination of creepy lo-fi video and tasteful suburbia creating some strong, unsettling dissonance.

A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.

The overall tone is more tongue-in-cheek than terrifying. Though some of the directors involved — like Lucky McKee ("May") and Neil Marshall ("The Descent") — have a hard horror pedigree, the emphasis here is on slickness.

On their own, each segment of Room is tense and emotional. But they’re even better placed back-to-back.

That’s the nature of Truth: a promising build-up, dead-ending into prosaic pontification.

For those fans who don't mind enduring some tedium and confusion, Yakuza Apocalypse at least offers something memorably bizarre.

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

(T)error moves forward chronologically, and features enough astonishing twists to rival any episode of "Homeland."

The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.

First-time writer-director Jason Lei Howden (who has a day job working for Peter Jackson’s special effects house Weta Digital) has delivered something amiably silly, liberally splattered with human viscera, and scored to the punishing grind of electric guitars.

While the game Chevalier keeps evolving into something darker, the movie Chevalier is fairly static. The style’s unchanging throughout, holding to a slow pace and a muted sense of humor.

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

Moore has made his best film in over a decade, and one that clarifies exactly what his strengths are.

At times plays like a case study more than a drama.

As an expression of the filmmaker’s own sense of guilt over buying into the Apple myth, this picture intends to be a bummer.

Stanley Nelson’s absorbing, provocative documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution measures how much and how little has changed since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Panthers in Oakland in 1966.

Bob Byington’s 7 Chinese Brothers is no "Listen Up Philip," but it’s an amiable enough slacker comedy, boosted by its star.

Some Kind Of Beautiful has a fine cast, but they’re stuck doing shtick.

Being Evel’s story is too plain in the telling, but it’s still incredible, and relevant in the way it shows how a person can achieve wealth and fame if he’s willing to leap way high—and to endure the inevitable wipeout.

The big difference is that We Come As Friends is observational, while the institutions Sauper is watching here are actively tampering with Sudanese customs, in the name of improving their economy and living conditions.

The ordinariness of this film—and the flatness of its video-shot images, relative to Blank’s beautiful-looking ’70s films — isn’t a significant drawback, given how eloquent Leacock can be.

This is a movie displaced in time. And it’s barely a movie. It’s more like a dusty, faded old pamphlet: “So your daughter’s decided to get gay-married…”

Alternately entertaining and unsettling documentary.

Beyond treating this story like a potboiler, Deraspe does her best to make A Gay Girl In Damascus cinematic. She alternates nicely framed and photographed interviews with some fairly expressive dramatic reenactments. Some of these are pretty powerful.

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.

Do I Sound Gay? gets into the mysteries of homosexual attraction and eroticism, and suggests that if Thorpe wants the kind of long-term relationship that Takei, Sedaris, and Savage have, he’ll have to get over his fetishization of the macho and learn to accept himself. That’s a poignant, powerful conclusion, all from asking one question.

A Poem Is A Naked Person is littered with striking moments that fit casually into Blank’s study of fame and aspiration.

Big Game tries a little of everything, but ultimately settles into being a scrappy, lower-budget spin on the Big Dopey Action Movie genre. And as with nearly every stab at the BDAM, the audience’s satisfaction will depend largely on just how dopey they expect it to be.

There’s just not enough innovation or insight here to stretch a footnote to feature-length.

For a film so slight, Doomsdays makes a strong impression.

While far from perfect, I Believe In Unicorns is unusually attuned to how it feels for a teenager to have her first intense, quasi-mature relationship, and how it feels for her to use that love affair as an escape from some serious problems at home.

Güeros is a vivid illustration of factionalism’s brute outcome, which has people choosing up sides and tossing bombs at people, while dismissing their victims’ complicated lives and problems.

Good Kill’s hero is both unsympathetic and uninteresting. That’s partly intentional. Niccol means to show how the drone program can reduce a formerly good man to mush. But making that point comes at the expense of making a nuanced, vibrant motion picture.

What saves 1001 Grams from being excruciatingly cute is that it does have a clean look and a pleasant tone, and it’s about a subject that’s both unusual and entertaining.

George Hencken’s Spandau Ballet documentary Soul Boys Of The Western World effectively serves two audiences: hardcore fans hoping for rare footage and in-depth interviews, and those who really only know the song “True,” and would be surprised to learn just how popular Spandau Ballet used to be.

It’s a mash-up of familiar genre elements—too familiar, frankly—given a welcome sense of scope and shading by the location.

The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.

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

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

While La Sapienza is unsatisfying as drama, it’s frequently beautiful just as a tour through architecturally significant Italian buildings. And it’s intellectually engaging as an elaboration of their larger meaning.

The Wrecking Crew is a provocative look back at an art form in transition, reflecting on the moment when it started to matter whether Mickey Dolenz was actually playing drums on The Monkees’ albums, and the moment when, according to Dolenz, people started to “take the rock ’n’ roll very seriously.”

While the plot relies too much on generalities, the film as a whole thrives on specifics.

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

The disconnect between Wild Canaries’ two modes is sometimes too wide, making the movie come across either as a sloppy mystery or a scatterbrained melodrama. More often, the mix keeps the film lively and unpredictable.

What Queen And Country has going for it that admirers of the original will appreciate—and that total novices can enjoy just as much—is how skillfully Boorman takes major historical events and filters them through small, personal moments.

The Elkabetzes don’t need the audience to have any firsthand experience of what Viviane and Elisha are actually like at home. Gett works better if the viewer has to puzzle out the truth from testimony, asides, and outbursts.

A documentary that’s both impressionistic and informative—admiring the magic of dance even in its formative stages, while also turning the making of art into a kind of procedural.

If nothing else, this film makes the case that the Cold War—however Fetisov or Polsky respectively choose to define it—robbed American sports fans of the chance to watch and appreciate one of the greatest collections of athletes ever assembled.

In keeping with the S&M theme, Matsumoto keeps changing R100’s direction, defying the audience in hopes of providing a more perverse kick. Often, the results are astonishing.

The greatest achievement of Middle Of Nowhere is that DuVernay and Corinealdi make Ruby’s big decision believable, by showing how it’s really just been a series of smaller choices.

There’s a sketchbook quality to La Última Película; it’s like notes for a movie that never really got made. Because the film is stubbornly unpolished, it all but dares viewers to scratch their heads and say they don’t get it.

Song Of The Sea is a triumph of design and animation, populating lavishly detailed, patterned backdrops with characters so simplified that they could’ve been cut-and-pasted from a newspaper comic strip.

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

While Fanon wrote with intense anger, he made his case more on an intellectual level than an emotional one, seeking to use his enemies’ words and logic against them. Olsson prefers to swing wildly.

Ullmann’s Miss Julie is as dominated by long speeches and conversations as Strindberg’s, but those scenes don’t play as well when the two would-be lovers are sidling up to each other in close-up, practically panting.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have thought through every scene and every line in Foxcatcher. Nothing is irrelevant. The film proceeds like a well-constructed argument.

On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter is doggedly down the middle, mixing sports action with talking-head interviews, set to an eclectic soundtrack of rock and country music. The movie feels scattered, jumping too quickly from subject to subject, with little of the original’s visual poetry.

Do the undeniably Malick-derived qualities of The Better Angels work against it, or is the film all the more special for being, essentially, a bonus Malick picture? To be fair to Edwards, a lot about The Better Angels sets it apart from Malick.

It’s simultaneously tricky and profound—a documentary about something small that gradually grows to cover so much more.

Revenge Of The Mekons has none of the raggedness of the band’s best songs, and the movie only occasionally gets to that very Mekons place that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes in the film, where despair and rage over the world’s pervasive injustice resolves into something blackly humorous, and even triumphant. But Angio hasn’t made a glancing, broadly outlined fan-doc, either.

As Laggies piles up one scene after another of Megan’s boyfriend and all her old high-school chums acting exaggeratedly square, the movie’s comic point of view becomes overpoweringly sour and predictable.

Because the tone is so erratic, it’s hard to know whether its anticlimactic quality is a botch on Araki’s part, or a purposeful bit of genre subversion.

Simien is clearly a talented, witty writer, with a fantastic sense of character development and dialogue, but he makes a lot of rookie mistakes as a filmmaker, from trying to cover too much ground in one movie to making stylistic choices that render Dear White People visually incomprehensible.

Throughout The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, even when it gets bogged down in too much story, the animation is so gorgeous that any given frame could pass for a masterwork.

Sleeping Beauty is the most beautiful movie the Disney’s feature animation department has ever made.

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

Her is such a well-drawn character sketch—with such a fantastic Chastain performance—that it practically justifies the whole experiment.

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

Hellaware is short enough that its doggedness never gets tedious, but the film’s near-total absence of curveballs exposes either a limited imagination, or a lack of time and money to flesh out the premise.

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

The material about the modern-day Peggy and Joe is incredibly sweet... But A Life In Dirty Movies is also fascinating just as a document of changing cultural mores.

The emotions evoked by Bird People should be familiar to anyone who ever stared out the window of a classroom, imagining what it would be like to leave school, hop on a bike, and go for a ride around the mostly empty neighborhood.

While Memphis is similar in style and in assurance to the lower-ambition Pavilion, it reaches toward something it can’t fully grasp.

While Murdoch exhibits masterful control in a recording studio, he isn’t a natural-born filmmaker. Much of God Help The Girl feels haphazardly stitched together, with pieces missing or placed in the wrong order, as though Murdoch didn’t get all the footage he needed.

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

The Possession Of Michael King has its share of jolts, but it becomes exhausting down the stretch, and disappointing for its squandered potential.

Here’s a seemingly twee movie that ultimately, surprisingly argues that some music isn’t for everybody, some people are too broken to fix, and some would-be artists are better off in the audience.

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.

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

Affleck is the perfect actor for this role, though he’s a little too mush-mouthed to do the voiceover narration required of a noir.

Shawn’s adaptation mostly follows Ibsen’s original text, which is what keeps A Master Builder on the level of a well-meaning but only intermittently electrifying exercise.

Too much of Ari Folman’s half-animated science-fiction feature The Congress feels just a bit off—but every now and then, the concept, the performances, and Folman’s visual flair combine to produce something extraordinary.

If the movie is about any one idea in particular, it’s about how parents do their best to stay on top of how their children grow, by taking pictures and documenting the memorable occasions, only to learn too late that most of life happens between the posing.

First Cousin Once Removed doesn’t come across as overly demeaning or exploitative, because Berliner himself is so kind to Honig in their meetings. But it’s hard to deny that Berliner is using Honig’s deteriorating condition as fodder for his art, just as it’s hard to deny that Berliner’s willingness to risk that criticism is what makes First Cousin Once Removed such a great film.

Polanski’s direction of Venus In Fur is masterful—a pleasure in and of itself—but Seigner is the star attraction here, giving one of the best performances of her distinguished career.

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

Dormant Beauty always comes back to the difficult decisions that family members have to make for each other, contrasted with the huffiness of outsiders who try to project their own beliefs onto someone else’s business.

As vibrant and ingratiating as We Are The Best! is, the movie lacks the more satisfying fullness of Moodysson’s Together and Lilya 4-Ever.

It’s more gentle and fanciful in tone, and though it’s as episodic and digressive as Jodorowsky’s best-known work, the various pieces add up to a clear, not-so-odd narrative.

Even as Cold In July’s overall arc approaches something of a dead-end, the individual scenes and performances are remarkable.

What saves Chinese Puzzle—making it not just tolerable, but likable—is how well Klapisch uses New York. The movie embraces the whole city.

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.

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

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

Directors Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math favor a deadpan, clear-eyed, strikingly simple approach that brings out both the humor and the pathos in the story.

Manakamana is both calming and imagination-sparking, forcing viewers to look at human faces for 10-minute stretches, whether those faces are talking excitedly or quietly looking around.

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

The extraordinary achievement of Under The Skin is that while Laura develops some human qualities, Glazer resists the temptation to turn this alien’s story into the story of what it means to be human.

The tedium of The Raid 2’s setup is offset by some of the most jaw-dropping, bone-crunching, flesh-ripping setpieces ever filmed.

With thoughtfulness and passion, von Trier strives to give his audience a high, accompanied by the meaning of the high.

The main problem with Jodorowsky’s Dune is that a significant amount of what makes Jodorowsky’s work special gets lost in Pavich’s fairly ordinary approach to the documentary form.

So far, Nymphomaniac looks like a major work from a major director: a compendium of all von Trier’s career-long preoccupations with gender roles, authoritarianism, religion, obsessive behavior, and lust.

Going strictly by plot description, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox sounds a little like an Indian knock-off of a Nicholas Sparks movie, but it plays out more like Brief Encounter.

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

7 Boxes is way too simple, but it mostly works, because every twist of the plot and turn of the street leads back to this one kid, who’ll do anything to make enough money to become someone other than himself.

Tim’s Vermeer is more of an engineering lecture. And while it’s edifying in and of itself, it’s almost more fascinating because of the reasons it never transforms into anything else.

The film is a poetic and lulling mediation on humanity as some kind of ancient alien race, which Reggio means to isolate and examine, as though he’s never encountered them before.

Generation War never becomes great, but it overcomes its stiff start in large part due to its scope.

What makes Like Father, Like Son so quietly powerful is that for the most part, it doesn’t traffic in stereotypes.

The Great Flood works as a wordless narrative of human endurance, showing communities gathering to stack sandbags, then gathering again to dig out of the muck after their previous efforts failed.

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

The Selfish Giant is a harsh movie, but it isn’t devoid of hope, because Barnard understands that everything has value—even if it can’t be realized until after an object’s been tossed out.

While the movie isn’t a consistently riveting four hours, Hoogendijk does keep finding images and moments that demystify the museum business while making the art seem all the more magical.

Bogliano provides a steady series of jolts, all the way to an ending that’s twisty but ultimately unsatisfying.

Some Velvet Morning is absorbing and enraging, sure to spark debate both about its meaning and its method. More importantly, it’s a phenomenal performance piece, with LaBute capturing the incredible gifts of two masters of pretense.

What’s missing from The Punk Singer is real friction or ambiguity.

Mettler is in no hurry to get to any particular point in The End Of Time. The film leaps from subject to subject—slowly, and somewhat haphazardly.

After watching Bettie Page Reveals All, even longtime devotees may not be able to look at one of her pictures again without hearing her voice, remembering her story, and appreciating her joy all the more.

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

Even though Gondry and Chomsky’s very different sensibilities don’t mesh in such a way that either man’s work gains substantially from the alliance, they’re each such good company individually that Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is still entertaining.

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

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.

Birth Of The Living Dead excels in Kuhns’ gathering of critics, academics, and filmmakers to analyze how and why the film works so well.

John Sayles’ Go For Sisters is his best film in more than a decade, and feels like one he could’ve made in the 1980s. It’s a small picture, simply presented, and exists outside of current trends—which isn’t always to its benefit.

What makes Baby Peggy: The Elephant In The Room so valuable, though, is that it isn’t just a 58-minute wallow in the misery of one long-forgotten, largely misunderstood American celebrity.

At its best, Running From Crazy is a powerful portrait of a woman who’s wrested control of her life by understanding the patterns her relatives fell into, and consciously breaking them.

Taken in the right spirit, The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology is a lot of fun, like watching a movie with a friend, then going out for drinks and talking late into the night. Just don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.

Il Futuro is a playful, soulful movie, affecting because it’s populated by lost children who can somehow sense they’re in a movie, and that in a movie, the only future is The End.

Spinning Plates is a slow starter... But the documentary finds more of a rhythm once it moves beyond generalities and starts getting into particulars.

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

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

Toad Road is sloppy and under-realized, but it should connect with anyone who’s ever made terrible choices for no good reason.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

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

Ultimately, all the metafictions and social commentary are too vague to have any meaning, beyond giving Johnson a foundational justification for this movie. But while The Dirties is in some ways appalling, it’s also effective.

Dark Touch is meant to touch a nerve, not merely spook. It’s about deeper fears, and realer monsters.

It has a good heart and a good cast, mixing Hollywood veterans with some of today’s better young TV stars. But the movie is strenuously, exhaustingly unfunny, in a way that makes its phoniness harder to bear.

Even at its goofiest, Through The Never brings back the communal appeal of those early concert films, which were often just a way for young fans to bond with other young fans over the music of entertainers who seemed to understand what they really wanted.

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

What makes Prisoners more potent than its oft-implausible mystery should allow is the way Villeneuve lingers over the textures of a terrible event.

What makes Informant so effective is that while its focus is on Darby, the story has a larger scope.

It’s a little frustrating at first to realize that Huber isn’t going to get much explanation of anything from Stanton. But she ends up making a virtue of the actor’s Zen calm.

For those able to overlook the obviousness, The Painting is both beautiful and affecting.

Red Obsession is informative, and entertainingly so, with its honeyed Russell Crowe narration and sweet tracking shots through sun-dappled vineyards.

Philibert allows even those who’ve never heard a second of Radio France to experience what the network is like, on both sides of the speakers.

Quietly, persuasively, Tokyo Waka asks whether cultures decline by pouring resources into propping up entities that can no longer support themselves.

The Trials Of Muhammad Ali’s real value is in showing—not just talking about—the time and place in which Ali lived.

This is a small film about a society of castoffs, and while it’s beautifully acted and often moving, it’s also predictable, because it keeps wresting itself into familiar forms.

Harlan’s film—written by Vikram Weet—is a routine low-budget genre picture, with blandly attractive young actors overmatched by the freakiness lurking in the wilderness.

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

You Will Be My Son works best when it’s at its most unforced, and when the world of wine-making—with its anticipation of the season’s cycles and its fascination with subtle changes in flavor—intersects naturally with the life of a European business leader who has skewed priorities.

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

Beneath the affectations, there’s poetry in Kid-Thing, and truth in its depiction of how absolute freedom can be a kind of trap.

Shelton seems so preoccupied with making Touchy Feely feel natural and real that she’s forgotten to add any incident.

The movie is one long game of misdirection, playing tricks on viewers from scene to scene, and showing how easy it is to steer a crowd into missing something important. That’s the real De Palma touch, even more than the operatic overtones and excess.

Marking...does her best to keep it lively, mixing in actual security-camera footage and animated re-creations, along with pieces of old tourist promotions, newsreels, and industrial films. But Smash & Grab’s overall tone is too reserved, given the subject matter.

The lack of anything resembling a narrative at times makes Pavilion feel more like a demo-reel than a movie, but the fleeting moments Sutton has captured are so vibrant that they accumulate into something that hums.

While Drug War is ultimately more an exercise in craft than a movie with a lot on its mind, it’s a remarkably skillful exercise, and hardly devoid of ideas.