Rob Nelson

A masterfully composed and suitably outraged look at the neocolonialist exploitation of South Sudan.

As much as the movie rocks, Lambert & Stamp drops the needle to reveal the deep pain barely hidden in the grooves.

The effort of sussing out this satire’s attitude seems silly for the fact that its jokes just aren’t funny enough.

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.

A dynamic and immersive piece of you-are-there verite.

The docu’s accomplished summary of tension-filled events as they transpired from minute to minute comes at the expense of wide-angle historical context.

A digressive, daringly experimental study of a flailing musician, magnetically played by accomplished bluesman and poet Willis Earl Beal.

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

An aptly intense and innovative study of pioneering rock poet Nick Cave, 20,000 Days on Earth playfully disguises itself as fiction while more than fulfilling the requirements of a biographical documentary.

Rossato-Bennett’s over-the-top narration often sounds cloying and banal... But the filmmaker succeeds in providing context, medical and historical, in between awakenings.

Camp X-Ray is most commendable for believably depicting the U.S. military from a female’s point of view.

[An] initially playful, ultimately haunting documentary.

Overly melodramatic but fairly engrossing.

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

Though the ugly phobia that gave rise to the killing and permeated the legal proceedings boils the blood, the film’s tone is somber rather than angry, and its effect is quietly devastating.

Director Argento half-heartedly mixes schlocky 3D f/x with one-dimensional characters for a near-two-hour joke that ought to have been funnier.

The ups and downs of a decades-long friendship are charted with warmth and sensitivity in Shepard and Dark.

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.

Milkshake sucks all the flavor out of a tasty premise.

Escape From Tomorrow is a sneakily subversive exercise in low-budget surrealism and anti-corporate satire.

Director Jesse James Miller’s bio of ‘80s-era World Boxing Council lightweight champ Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini connects on emotional levels in the telling of an up-from-nothing brawler whose colorful career climaxed in tragedy.

The brisk, brief feature appears more atmospheric than terrifying, but its bare-bones tale gets under the skin.

By turns pulse-quickening and contemplative, The Crash Reel is a thoroughly winning docu portrait of former pro snowboarder Kevin Pearce.

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.

It takes pains to make the political personal, forging the viewer’s identification with Scahill by making persistent use of his voiceover narration and keeping him oncamera throughout.

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.

Reducing an immensely disturbing, politically byzantine tale to a series of cartoonish vignettes, this celeb-studded biopic squanders a gutsy performance by Amanda Seyfried.

The clearest achievement of Dolan’s typically self-indulgent eye-popper comes in equating its gender-bending protagonist’s metamorphoses with those in any relationship that lasts for years.

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

Straining to be a distaff “Deliverance,” indie thriller Black Rock is unable to shock, much less convince.

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.

Skillfully adapted from Tim Tharp's novel, evocatively lensed in the working-class neighborhoods of Athens, Ga., and tenderly acted by Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, this bittersweet ode to the moment of childhood's end builds quietly to a pitch-perfect finale.

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.

Handsomely produced and never less than hugely entertaining, Ascher's film is catnip for Kubrickians and critics both professional and otherwise.

Give or take the titular disclosure, John Dies at the End is a thoroughly unpredictable horror-comedy -- and an immensely entertaining one, too.

A bona fide high-wire act, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away delivers towering thrills through its candy-colored 3D ode to the titular outfit's astounding acrobatics.

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

A highly satisfying Western-cum-noir in the old tradition, Deadfall is alive in ways that are all too rare among American movies.

Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious Holy Motors coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions.

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.

First-time writer-director Aurora Guerrero beautifully captures the fluctuating dynamics of friendship between 15-year-old girls in Mosquita y Mari.

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.

Much like the band's self-conscious synth-pop itself, "Shut Up" is initially satiric but ultimately disarming in its emotional resonance.

Gets one's attention but doesn't keep it, due to ill-cued flashbacks, groan-inducing dialogue and wooden performances.

An aptly infuriating expose of sexual abuse within the U.S. military, Kirby Dick's documentary The Invisible War calls high-ranking officials to account for turning a blind eye to a violent epidemic.

The picture scores big points by drawing a sharp distinction between corporate vidgame programmers and indies.

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.

Under African Skies is appreciably smarter than most celebrity musician documentaries.

There's no mistaking Jardin's playful mastery of the Hollywood-style action aesthetic; his movie starts in high gear and accelerates steadily from there.

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.

Focusing on the absurdly ultraviolent tit-for-tat tussles among a trio of Tokyo crime families, the film is a beautifully staged marvel that confidently reasserts Kitano's considerable cinematic gifts.

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

In this case, Montiel's awkward appropriation of gritty crime-drama conventions results in a film that's contrived and implausible, at times absurdly so.

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.

In the curious absence of religious satire, toilet humor isn't enough to constitute comedy, while the leads' grating performances make 81 minutes feel eternal.

Far less chilling than versions from 1951 and 1982, Universal's latest take on The Thing at least has a strong lead thesp in Mary Elizabeth Winstead, recruited for the studio's bid to turn a tale of ice-cold macho paranoia into a beauty-vs.-beast shocker a la "Alien."

Paramount's Footloose reboot never quite cuts loose enough to distinguish itself from the original.

Shovels enough dirt on the Tea Party guru and self-described hockey mom to satisfy her haters, but lacks sufficient humor and insight to make it a must-see for anyone outside the Brit muckraker's fan base.

Finding a pulse only in the band's late-reel performance of "Alive," a lusty passage that would've begun a pic intent on making a case for the group's greatness, "Twenty" simply counts the years from 1991 via sludgy backstage and onstage footage whose rarity can't forgive its inclusion. Crowe's critic mentor, the late Lester Bangs, would cringe.

Unlike his "Snakes on a Plane," director David R. Ellis' sharks-in-a-lake thriller displays little sense of its scenario's camp potential. Gore, too, is in short supply on account of the pic's PG-13 rating, which renders the attack scenes nearly toothless.

Even at 73 minutes, the film is, well, too damn long.

A handsomely mounted adaptation of the like-titled Portuguese novel, Ruiz's 4 1/2-hour epic establishes the essential ambiguity of its chameleonic characters from the get-go and proceeds thereby, with riveting results and revelations that continue right to the end.

A movie that tries and fails to channel the indelibly dreamy mood of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides." Well-intentioned but derivative and only intermittently engaging, the suburban Michigan-set indie hits at least as many false notes as true ones.

A weaker "Elephant," Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve's school-shooting drama Polytechnique nevertheless distinguishes itself by endeavoring to comprehend the 25-year-old man who murdered more than a dozen female students at Montreal's Polytechnique School in 1989.

An aptly gorgeous-looking Manhattan meller whose quartet of sexy actors proves no less attractive than the well-mounted picture as a whole.

Distinguished by splashy cinematography, engaging performances from Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt as the girl's go-get-'em parents.

Waiting for Super to deliver the funny is an experience as long as the film itself.

A possession thriller less terrifying than fun.

More compelling as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, Certified Copy finds deep-thinking writer-director Abbas Kiarostami asserting there's nothing new under the Tuscan sun, particularly not his own conventional romantic drama set in rural Italy.

Repugnant content, grislier than the ugliest torture porn, ought to have made the film unwatchable, but it doesn't, simply because Kim's picture is so beautifully filmed, carefully structured and viscerally engaging.

Despite amply funded f/x, including some spectacular muscle-car stunts, the movie motors to the grindhouse with squealing tires and guitars, gratuitous nudity and gore, and a scantily clad greasy-spoon waitress endearingly played by Amber Heard.

Splashy colors, oddball framing, super-cool threads and cranked-up retro music supply the picture's bizarre love triangle with a dance-club atmosphere that'll seduce young audiences of most any orientation.

The movie is witty only on occasion. But it lingers in the mind, thanks largely to its trio of actors -- especially Alex Karpovsky.

Formulaic and forgettable.

That Saw 3D is relentlessly repugnant will delight the franchise's fans and surprise almost no one. The best that can be said for the picture, gamely directed by longtime "Saw" cutter Kevin Greutert, is that it offers little in between the traps, which are more creatively vicious than they've ever been.

Though stretched to a two-hour run time, Doctorow's socially critical tale is reduced to queasy spectacle.

Sparked by wonderfully lived-in performances from Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right is alright, if not up to the level of writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's earlier pair of new bohemian dramas, "High Art" and "Laurel Canyon."

Those wearing black finger-polish are bound to appreciate it, but first-time feature director Alexandre Franchi deserves mainstream cred for his own cheeky role-play.

Not clever enough to be truly pretentious.

Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie’s hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old “Halloween.”

Slight but winning and often funny, the scrappy Amerindie Wah Do Dem is a fish-out-of-water comedy driven by Sean "Bones" Sullivan's offbeat performance.

This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.

Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.

Bullets fly and jokes land with a thud in Killers, a deadly dull hubby's-a-hit man farce that alternately resembles a knockoff of 2005's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and a rehash of "Knight & Day" avant la lettre .

In purely cinematic terms, Buried, set in late 2006, is an ingenious exercise in sustained tension that would make Alfred Hitchcock turn over in his grave.