Scott Tobias

Imagine Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” stripped of its politics, its wit, its humanity, and its craft, and that only gets halfway down the bottom of the barrel scraped by Officer Downe, a hyper-aggressive and thoroughly repugnant piece of comic-book juvenalia.

Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.

With her confident second feature, director Sophia Takal (“Green”) takes on Tinseltown misogyny and the toxic rivalry between friends, but that’s mere prelude to a gonzo meta-fiction that deconstructs itself nearly to death.

Buoyed by Hong’s romantic optimism, the immensely satisfying conclusion hints at the possibility of love as a renewable resource, so long as both partners are flexible to different terms. Yourself and Yours asks the audience to take the same leap — best to keep an open mind and go with the flow.

Baxter packs the film with sound insights on masculinity and young adulthood, as well as the hand-to-mouth realities of black-market farming.

It takes an uncommon talent to keep the mundane from seeming inert, and through Solnicki’s lens, the absence of outer conflict doesn’t mute the turmoil within.

Gonzalo’s dalliances add up to precious little, but Veiroj’s comic tone finds purchase in his absurd run-ins with the bishop and a church so unwilling to lose a member from the rolls that they’ll stick him in a bureaucratic roundabout until he gives up.

With this rueful, cantankerous yet hugely charismatic figure at its center, Tony Stone’s beautiful documentary reveals the twin burdens of working the farm alone while beating back an encroaching inner darkness.

The film has the visceral kick of brainiacs willing each other into bloody oblivion, but struggles to justify its own stock mayhem, much less plumb Cronenbergian depths.

Embers offers a series of compelling premises and never follows through on them, content to drift along on its characters’ dull malaise and allow self-conscious visual poetry to stand in for real emotion.

First-time director Harrison Atkins never quite finds his own distinct voice. He dabbles in horror and deadpan comedy, experiments in discordant jags on the soundtrack, and suggests a more fluid boundary between the living and the dead, but the film remains stubbornly hazy and obscure in its intentions.

Farr delves into the sticky issue of parental ambivalence, but he only goes deep enough to carve a small pit in the viewer’s stomach.

At some point in the production process, co-writer/director Greg McLean must have believed he was making John Cassavetes’ “Poltergeist,” but this odd fusion of psychodrama and supernatural hokum gets away from him.

None of Jack’s relationships are handled with enough conviction to make them stick, and that carries over to a religious message that’s squishy in the extreme. “Agreeable” is a good quality, but it should never be the best quality a film possesses.

As it stands, there are only enough comic ideas here, most of them bad ones, to reach 82 minutes; the other 11 are taken up by a postscript scene, a blooper, and closing credits that move, in the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as slow as molasses in January.

Short of putting Emmanuel Lubezki through astronaut training, it’s difficult to imagine more rapturously beautiful images of the Earth from orbit than those supplied by A Beautiful Planet, the latest collaboration between Imax and NASA.

An attractive and appealing cast helps this formulaic pablum go down easy, but the genial tone buffs the edge out of every element.

The action never stops once the first car bomb is triggered, but the second half of London Has Fallen takes place mostly in the dark, where nobody can see the budget.

Were it not so committed to telling the official story in bullet points, Race might have found a more provocative angle about athletes and artists who work through and around the powers that be.

Covering the emotional spectrum between dog farts on one end and tragedy on the other reps a tonal challenge that Showtime! can’t pull off, despite a gentler touch than most kiddie fare of its kind.

It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.

Though Parker’s assured performance, along with the enchanting backdrop, eases the action toward harmless gentility, they’re hijacked by a plot that mimics the plate-spinning business of classic screwball, but moves at agonizing half-speed.

At a minimum, a parody should be funnier than the film it’s sending up, but Fifty Shades of Black, a quick-and-dirty riff on last year’s S&M romance “Fifty Shades of Grey,” falls a laugh or two short of even that low standard.

Monahan isn’t required to satisfy bloodlust or to pay off conventional plot points, even if his screenplay for “The Departed” displayed an abundant talent for doing so. But he assumes too much in believing that the audience will connect in any way with a sour, prickly narcissist who’s trapped in the gilded cage of wealth and fame.

Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.

Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope.

While there’s something compelling about an antihero whose obsession is poised on the razor’s edge between love and hate, The World of Kanako buries it in grinding, agitated repetition.

My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.

There’s nothing remotely fresh about this revival, but tight pacing and an overqualified cast keep things zipping along nicely.

Adapting Alonso Cueto’s novel “La pasajera,” del Solar turns the screws on the audience expertly, but the thriller elements never distract from the moral crisis of a man — and a country — whose decades-old mistakes cling to him like a tattoo.

In broad strokes, the events that unfold are undeniably riveting.... The trouble is, The 33 only knows broad strokes. Lacking any specific angle on the ordeal, the filmmakers give the once-over-lightly treatment to every aspect of it, which ensures that none of them will be properly served.

The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.

In trying to make sense of an android’s point-of-view, Sono has sensibly turned repetition and routine into a narrative strategy, but the unrelieved tedium of The Whispering Star takes a toll. If anything, Sono’s past work has suffered from a an overabundance of jokes, digressions, and crazed visual flourishes, but their near-total absence here becomes a problem of another kind.

Joseph winds up with an disorganized mishmash of visual gimmicks, empty exoticism, and soundbites worthy of “This is Spinal Tap.” Great music and some dynamic, up-close concert footage gives it the occasional life, but The Reflektor Tapes will appeal to Arcade Fire devotees only and even their patience might be tested.

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood are both superb in the lead roles, but Rozema’s emphasis on the primacy of family and nature exposes a deficit of visual and narrative imagination.

Bruce McDonald’s Hellions is an unpleasant muddle of the visceral and the abstract.

While Creep has the limited scope of DIY filmmaking at its most rudimentary, that contributes to a tone that’s unusually playful and entertaining without coming off as a lark.

Hayden and Perez do their best to generate sweetness and spark, but the obstacles separating these characters are as contrived as the cliches that animate them.

Though Cartel Land isn’t interested in making fact-filled statements about the drug war, Heineman’s ingenious conceit gets at the difficulty ordinary people have in doing something about it.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.

There’s a touching story here about a boy getting over his grief and narcissism by nursing a dog through its own set of traumas, but Max is far too gung-ho about playing up the pup’s heroism and self-sacrifice to give it much time to develop.

Generally speaking, the more obscure the fetish, the worse the subplot gets, though they all wear out their one-joke welcome before Lawson inevitably turns up the sentiment and makes the film about love and kids and happy unions.

The payoff may be predictable, but Banker and Everson are refreshingly unclear about how they—and viewers—feel about it. They just stay true to their protagonist’s feelings, see their premise through to the end, and leave it others to sort out. For a thesis-statement of a movie, that’s the riskiest possible conclusion.

As a loaded summary of an important, disquieting chapter in Illinois legal history, A Murder In The Park gets the blood boiling, and suggests a justice system open to manipulation by bad actors.

Escobar: Paradise Lost takes such a limited view of this multi-faceted figure that it fails as portraiture, and the real center of the film is too much of a bland good guy to compensate.

United Passions leaves no historical-drama cliché unexploited: the voiceover narration, the jumbled Europudding accents, the expository dialogue, the hasty compression of major world events, the thickly applied old-age makeup, the not remotely seamless mix of re-creations and archival footage. It’s all there, in support of FIFA’s lies.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

It’s easier to tell the story of a smashing success or an utter failure, because there’s drama inherent to either scenario, but what Hansen-Løve accomplishes with Eden is trickier, a feeling of being adrift in a scene where people are already invited to lose themselves to dance.

If there’s anything worth extrapolating from The Tribe, it isn’t the deaf experience so much as recognizing our own tendencies to conform to certain unspoken laws. The more insular a society, the more severe the consequences of rebellion.

Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

Gomez-Rejon has erected a gleaming shrine to adolescent narcissism.

With The Nightmare, Ascher abandons the strictures of a conventional documentary to frolic in the terrifying netherworlds of human consciousness. It’s not enough for Ascher, a sufferer himself, to tell his audience about sleep paralysis—they have to feel it, too.

Lockdown is mostly a humorless bore until the obligatory bloopers and outtakes in the end credits—and even those are drawing from a flat vein, since there’s so little play in the movie.

The movie offers more of the same, only more: more T&A, more conspicuous consumption, more cameos, more Jeremy Piven yelling, and significantly more Mark Cuban than anyone outside the city of Dallas needs to see.

Despite a too-neat resolution, the characters in Results haven’t figured themselves out, much less their relationships, and Bujalski is perfectly comfortable sorting through their confusion.

While Barely Lethal is conscious of the clichés of the genre, it’s also the type of film that won’t let that get in the way of regurgitating them.

Heaven Knows What isn’t interested in merely exploring the world of New York City addicts. It wants to make their experiences felt, with the dissonant, amp-cracking roar of a punk anthem.

There are reasons why everyone on screen looks as unhappy as they do, but Llosa puts viewers in a place where they can’t understand precisely why, so the only choice is to sit there marinating in misery and boredom.

It’s only fitting that a series that began with the concept of linking the digestive tracts of three people would end by feasting on its own shit.

The grace notes in Dujardin’s performance are an important booster for The Connection, which conspicuously lacks the grit and flavor of William Friedkin’s tangentially related The French Connection, and at worst unfolds like Scorsese-lite.

Searching for originality in an addiction narrative like Animals is a problem, because these stories of decline and degradation tend to sound the same. So the limited time frame is the film’s strongest asset, because it’s only paying attention to the final hours.

Amelio’s latest, Intrepido: A Lonely Hero, reveals the same strengths and weaknesses as his work two decades ago—an appealing sincerity and social awareness, dogged by a mile-wide sentimental streak. In this case, when Intrepido tilts from whimsical comedy to metaphysical drama, it falls right off the cliff.

Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.

Past the novelty of its conceit and casting, and the animating intelligence of its first-time director, Henry Hobson, Maggie is a bit of a drag.

Director Tiller Russell doesn’t spin this gripping tale out of cinematic bravado like Scorsese—just extensive interviews with all the people involved, footage of a commission hearing after the fact, and a wealth of stock material on Brooklyn’s East Side. But he paints a vivid picture all the same.

The simplicity of the film’s East Coast/West Coast assumptions bear out in the rest of the script, which rides such tidy little symmetries all the way to shore, as mom learns to relax and her son grows up a bit. Meeting somewhere in the middle is what mediocrities do.

The accumulation of weird incidents and fake-outs doesn’t lead anywhere productive. That’s the problem with Dupieux’s vacant brand of surrealism: If you just keep pulling out the rug, there will never be anything to stand on.

There’s nothing out of order here—the locales are appropriately dingy and atmospheric, the lead character is compellingly rotten, the plot tightens to a vise squeeze in the third act—but every beat that isn’t provided by The The strikes exactly where it’s expected.

Morgen isn’t interested in rehashing the facts and highlights of Cobain’s life and career, or in providing chin-scratching insights via music scholars and other talking heads. He’s made an impression of Cobain, which is a much more intuitive and vital enterprise.

Sorting through the shards of the Ottoman Empire requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe. His on-screen persona could stand to be as modest as his filmmaking abilities.

Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten could stand to be a tighter, punchier assemblage of music and talking heads, but Pirozzi has gathered an impressive array of surviving musicians and family members willing to talk about the targeting of artists for propaganda and death.

Photographed in muted interiors and under perpetually cloudy skies, Félix And Meira has the somber tone of a romance couched in painful sacrifice, but there’s also sweetness and joy in Meira slowly emerging from her shell.

Goold, a highly regarded British theater director making his debut feature, lacks the panache to realize this twisted relationship onscreen. Instead he’s made a stolid, well-acted, intelligent drama that respects the complications of Finkel and Longo’s storytelling agendas without bringing them to life.

Sparks has to rely on exterior plot machinations because his characters lack any inner life.

Though Rebels Of The Neon God is missing the austerity and discipline that would make Tsai’s master-shot style so effective—and funny—its relatively conventional approach (including a recurring musical theme!) doesn’t obscure the beautiful, enigmatic tone that’s long set him apart.

Despite some genuinely arresting imagery—urban decay abstracted as poetic horror—the true narrative of Lost River is its bizarre, haphazard search for its own identity.

Clouds Of Sils Maria is a great midlife crisis film, in other words, and, like Irma Vep, it’s also a great meta-commentary on contemporary moviemaking, with Assayas making keen observations about modern celebrity, screen-devouring blockbusters, Internet gossip culture, and the next generation of actresses, represented here by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

It’s a richly imagined drama that gives everyone involved a specific and understandable set of motives for acting the way they do.

With familiar faces like Arquette and Sevigny turning up in nothing roles, the film looks like a cheap, underproduced facsimile of the crime movies it’s trying to emulate. It goes down in a blaze of hoary.

Ned Rifle feels closer to vintage Hartley than anything since 2001’s crazily underrated flop No Such Thing knocked him into semi-obscurity, but its dogged insularity stifles the modest pleasure of hearing the director’s distinct voice and watching his old favorites slip back into familiar roles.

Accepted as fantasy, 5 To 7 has a bright, literate charm that’s hard to resist, thanks to the scattered witticisms in Levin’s script, a deftly managed tone, and fine performances across the cast.

Showing the best of humanity and the worst of humanity doesn’t mean denying one in favor of the other; taken together, Salgado’s photographs have the scope and perspective of someone who can genuinely say he’s seen it all.

With Depardieu’s intensely physical performance at its core, Welcome To New York achieves a level of intimacy that’s rare for films about public figures—and, in this case, exposes Strauss-Kahn for all to see.

Locking into the film’s rhythms requires patience and an abandonment of preconceptions, but it’s nonetheless Alonso’s most accessible work to date, buoyed by spare but lush photography and Viggo Mortensen’s magnetic presence in the lead role. It takes a special kind of charisma to bring viewers along on a journey to nowhere.

Spring’s overall balance suggests that Benson and Moorhead are students of Italian genre cinema and of human behavior; the film has insight and style to burn.

The Zellners are tapping into the allure of movies, that fundamental desire we have to escape our humdrum lives and give ourselves over to the more exciting ones playing out onscreen.

Serena is quite bad, as it happens, but until it goes absolutely haywire in the final act, the biggest problem is that it’s all bones and no flesh, so busy combining all the structural elements that go into an award-winner that it has no personality of its own.

Champs dances around the ring when it should be punching.

Mitchell’s deft handling of the relationships in It Follows gets threaded into an ingenious and exceedingly skillful creepshow.

As Marty continues to run scams, the laughs continue unabated, but the dread only deepens, because we realize he’s a creature of need, capable of anything but empathy. And he’s been pushed to the precipice.

Though Kenner’s slick graphics and attractively photographed talking heads call Errol Morris to mind, his methods are significantly less subtle.

In the end, the film isn’t scary and it isn’t all that brainy, either. It’s just a juicy metaphor in search of worthy action to support it.

Smith and Robbie have great chemistry together, and neither of them try too hard to complicate their fun, sexy partnership.

If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.

“My Life Directed” is mostly disposable, just the sort of home-movie project a restless artist might sketch while stuck in a hotel room for a few months. It’s not a movie so much as a cry for help.

With its genuine interest in the immigrant experience and what it means to be an American, McFarland USA ekes out a victory in the margins, proving that a little openness and a little self-awareness can do wonders.

Much of the observational brilliance of Approaching The Elephant comes from how closely form relates to content: Out of chaos comes order, both at Teddy McArdle and in the film, which brings the personalities and conflicts into sharper focus as it goes along.

Perhaps it was deliberate strategy on the part of McCann and his screenwriter, Anthony Di Pietro, to neutralize the politics of a mass killing and focus more on the psychic stress that triggered it. But even if that was the case, it doesn’t make the film any less crushingly banal.