Peter Sobczynski

As an enormous fan of Argento, I would love to be able to report that “Dark Glasses” is a worthy entry in his filmography, even if I had to go out on a limb to make my case. However, there's no branch long enough that would allow anyone to defend this particular effort, perhaps the only way in which the word “effort” could be used in conjunction with this film.

This "Goodnight Mommy" replicates the basic story beats of the original but leaves out all of the tension, ambiguity, and nasty invention that made that earlier effort so effective in the first place.

With his latest film, “House of Darkness,” LaBute tries something similar to "The Wicker Man." And while the results may not be nearly as outlandish this time around, they do make for an intriguing and occasionally quite witty battle of the sexes, in which not all of the bloodshed is strictly metaphorical.

Whether or not Blanco is able to save his factory, Bardem is able to navigate the narrative missteps surrounding him and ultimately make "The Good Boss" worth a look.

Listening to these people grapple with Proust’s work and relate it to their own individual lifetimes of experience is often fascinating.

Endangered is unlikely to change the minds of anti-press zealots (not that they'd even be watching it in the first place) but others will hopefully come out of it both shocked and startled to see what is happening to journalists around the world these days.

Despite my ostensible disinterest in the subject at hand, I found myself mesmerized by this spare, affecting, and powerfully humane work that may seem quiet and reserved, but which ends up packing a surprisingly powerful emotional punch by the end.

Instead of leaving viewers with a better or more informed idea of what makes her tick as a person and as an artist, "Halftime" feels more like a ruthlessly efficient election ad for a political campaign that was decided a long time ago.

To give Deception, the latest attempt to bring Roth to the screen, a little bit of credit, it does come closer than most to rendering his prose stylings into cinematic terms. But it does so in a film so lifeless and inert from a dramatic standpoint that few viewers are likely to notice or even care.

Memory is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well.

Take Me to the River: New Orleans is essentially a feature-length version of a commercial put out by the city’s tourism board hoping to lure visitors by offering them little bits of a lot of different things in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. It has been made with plenty of sincerity but that alone does not guarantee quality filmmaking.

This Italian import's title may make it sound like either a kids movie or a cooking documentary, but it proves to be a wild and compelling work that simultaneously evokes the influence of such disparate filmmakers as Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, and Sergio Leone (not to mention a dash of “Broadway Danny Rose”-era Woody Allen) while still coming across as a fresh and unique cinematic vision.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

The lo-fi horror film "Night's End" tries to combine old-fashioned haunted house chills with more contemporary technological terrors, but never quite figures out how to do that.

The film bizarrely takes what could have been a touching and powerful drama about the traumatic family ties that bind (and occasionally choke) and attempts to refit it as a straightforward, if mostly low-key horror exercise chock-full of scenes involving various things popping up out of the darkness with numbing regularity.

Whatever "Breaking Bread" lacks in artistic ambition, it makes up for with its good heart, sincere intentions, and, most importantly, all of those luscious images of food.

The Pact starts off on an intriguing note and has some moments when it does work (especially the ones involving Grete), but while it's theoretically filled with dark psychological underpinnings, it seems oddly reticent to deal with them in any significant way.

The Long Night wants to create a sense of encroaching fear and unease in viewers but cannot inspire much of anything other than boredom and apathy.

The trouble is that while many of these bits and pieces are often fascinating, they never quite pull together into a truly compelling or satisfying narrative.

Although their work is ultimately not enough to make “See for Me” anything more than a gimmick movie that never quite pays off, Davenport almost makes it worth watching and will leave you wondering about what they could accomplish with stronger material.

The best family films capture the imaginations of younger viewers and teach them the power of storytelling in ways that can affect them for their entire lives, possibly inspiring them to create their own stories as well. By comparison, “Sing 2” serves no other purpose than to waste a couple of hours.

Although it's undeniably well-made, it lacks the kind of energy that might have helped make it truly come alive, and seem like more than a historical reenactment.

Most viewers will find themselves wishing that writer/director Patrick Ridremont had come up with a few variations on this standard theme in order to liven up this competently executed but painfully familiar genre exercise.

For the most part, So Late So Soon is a moving and thoughtful meditation on the inevitability of aging and mortality and the unstoppable lure of the creative process.

A film that is a somewhat uneven journey, though one that proves to be ultimately rewarding in the end.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.