Rob Nelson

If a dominatrix is one who takes total control of her passive partner, then R100 is the cinematic equivalent of a kinky femme fatale in black leather and stiletto heels, cracking a whip and a smile.

Some genre fans who prefer the silly to the satiric may bite, but the anemic pic isn’t remotely weird or witty enough for cult immortality.

An extraordinarily engrossing tale becomes an extremely uncinematic experience in the hands of Israeli documentarian Nadav Schirman.

Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.

The narratively jumbled film...features too many scenes that amount to mere stargazing.

Acquitting herself capably in a lead role that strips her bare in more ways than one, Robin Weigert (HBO’s “Deadwood”) proves worthy of a future in features, whereas first-time writer-director Stacie Passon mainly exposes her background in commercials.

Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy (“The Garden”) favors formulaic uplift over investigation, failing to offer a p.o.v. on whether young creative people should be driven as mercilessly as these. Lackluster videography further dulls the pic, which culminates in frustratingly fleeting glimpses of the students’ year-end performances.

Bursting with cheap f/x, the pic is often tedious when not repugnant, but it’s hard to dislike.

Abundantly goofy, but atmospheric only in spots, this flat-affect screwballer has its moments, and may attract a minor cult.

This disarmingly cheeky, intermittently gorgeous trifle would create the perfect bookend to a career begun almost 50 years ago.

The helmer’s narrative dead end here registers not as a lack of nerve so much as a lack of imagination.

This documentary plays like an extended episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” deficient as it is in stylistic zeal, investigative spirit and plain old scares.

This merciless work of anti-entertainment is arguably admirable for being as disturbingly disgusting as it wants to be.

Oddly overstuffed with cameos by bigscreen actors playing tongue-in-cheek versions of themselves, Webber's Los Angeles-set, microbudget dramedy delivers some rare and beautiful moments of daddy day-care, but its tone shifts more wildly than a preschooler's disposition and its narrative is stillborn.

A costumer that's well named for being pleasant and conventional but little more.

Solidly acted but aloof and slow as molasses.

First-time writer-director Stephen Chbosky adapts his young-adult bestseller with far more passion than skill, which suits familiar scenes of adolescent awkwardness aptly enough.

A literary film that stands to work best for those who don't read, The Words is a slick, superficially clever compendium of stories about authors of uncertain talent and varying success.

This monotonously deadpan coming-of-age comedy has little to recommend it beyond some beautiful widescreen cinematography and the momentary kick of seeing David Duchovny looking like a stoned Jesus as Goat Man.

This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.

A typically smart performance by Juliette Binoche isn't enough to keep Elles from drowning in pseudo-intellectual pretension and general banality.

Payback is a rarefied conceptual documentary that will appeal to a limited but highly appreciative audience.

Pulling off the thespian equivalent of running a marathon, the hyperventilating Olsen works awfully hard in the service of a film that, in the end, does little or nothing to preserve her character's integrity.

Even devotees of the Replacements' defiant perversity will be unsatisfied with this talky tribute to a noisy band.

Variably articulate subjects drone on and on in an 83-minute film that could easily make its TV news-style point in a half-hour or less.

Alternately gutsy and preachy, specific and scattered, the righteously angry pic risks alienating those who could be galvanized by its proof of Big Oil's corrupting omnipotence.

We Bought a Zoo is an odd bird, warm-blooded but largely lifeless.

Mistaking over-the-top dysfunctional family cruelty for comedy and drama, Another Happy Day tries and fails to channel "Rachel Getting Married" in its protracted tale of a wedding-party weekend that turns predictably from scabrous to redemptive.