Pete Vonder Haar

A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants.

The unique setting aside, there's just not much to sink your fangs into.

Director Adam Randall keeps the action tightly paced and the dialogue to a refreshing minimum, helping to heighten Matt's growing isolation.

Standoff holds up as a welcome alternative to its more strident brethren.

While his story is moving, Godspeed would perhaps have been more powerful if Barry spent more time balancing Jones's relative good fortune with the monumental hurdles faced by the less fortunate with similar injuries, instead of touching upon the issue in the film's final minutes.

Predictably ridiculous.

What starts as a somewhat charming — if prosaic — story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.

Home Sweet Hell is a pleasantly unpleasant dark comedy, one that gives new meaning to "detached and subdivided" in the mass production zone.

The tension in Missionary is surprisingly effective, especially given how easy it should be to put out an APB on a guy on a freaking bicycle, and there are enough scares to remind you to keep the chain latched when those polite young men in the slacks and neckties drop by.

It's serviceable.

A broad and occasionally disjointed indictment of the New York art scene and horrorcore rap that leaves no broad side of a barn untargeted.

Intermittently refreshing yet thoroughly unpleasant.

Mostly, Guilty of Romance seems content allowing characters to verbally abuse each other before eventually reaching the inevitable conclusion that life is a burden and all love is illusory.

Sommers's script relies on rapid-fire banter between Odd, girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin) — yes, that's her real name — and Chief Porter (Dafoe), but occasionally feels forced.

It's in the film's second half that Parkland goes all Tony Romo and fumbles. Instead of becoming truly engrossing, it threatens to descend into unreserved melodrama.

The doc affords us a look into a world rarely seen by the lumpenproletariat, though we could have done with fewer aerial/time-lapse shots and more history.

As an official history, Spark shines adequate light; I just wish it had spent a little more time on the shadows.

Writer-director Clément Michel can't escape the usual infant-related movie pitfalls.

Hunky Dory isn't blazing any trails, but if you're not wholly burned out by the genre and/or look back fondly on the Glam era, you'll find musicals haven't yet completely gone to the (diamond) dogs.

Firewall’s predictable second half betrays the film's early promise.

The Longest Yard lives or dies with its physical humor, a form of recent comedy I like to call slapstick sadism.

On the whole, The Brothers Grimm is a mess; a formerly daring director’s attempt to cash in on big studio backing even after the rug has been pulled out from under him.

Works best when it sticks to some of the tenets of successful horror; namely, gore and surprise.

One of the drawbacks to rushing your sequel to theaters is that there's not a lot of time to hone dialogue and performances.

It's noisy, nonsensical, and will fade from your consciousness even before you make it out of the theater lobby, but it's entertaining enough, and Tamahori throws us a few curve balls to keep things interesting.

Leatherheads is as trifling as Clooney’s second movie (“Good Night and Good Luck”) was significant, but that’s okay. It succeeds where so many other romantic comedies fail because of a superior script and because everyone involved has the good sense not to take themselves too seriously.

It has its share of eye-rolling moments, but at its heart there's a decent story.

Should have billed itself as a fairy tale, as that’s the only possible way to swallow what Prince-Bythewood and Kidd are feeding us.