Scott Tobias

A Touch Of Sin stumbles in the coda, which makes the themes embedded in its title too explicit, but it’s a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.

While it’s a shame Leong couldn’t find a fresher approach to Lin’s story—and that he left out any postscript about his struggles the following season in Houston—he does well in setting the stakes.

Matti’s primary order of business is regularly serving up tense, stylish action sequences, and he proves more adept choreographing those than sorting out the convolutions of his parallel plotlines.

The Short Game is like a tape-delayed Olympics: old footage, slick bios, no substance.

This is grave business, and After Tiller registers the weight of it.

There’s an overlay of gender politics, but it isn’t so firmly ingrained in the material that it transforms Levine’s throwback ’80s slasher film into a much nobler, more thoughtful endeavor.

Afternoon Delight is one of those bad films that seem to drift further and further away from a recognizable reality the more we get to know it.

It couldn’t be a simpler, more workable premise for a good B-movie, but the amount of effort put into making it fast and edgy is inversely proportional to the scant thrills it yields.

It’s a slickly packaged, proficient thriller first, political statement a distant, speck-on-the-horizon second.

Seidl could not be clearer in his associations between religion and sex, but in Paradise: Faith, he’s slightly less successful in mining them for greater insights.

Cutie And The Boxer chronicles a marriage that’s extraordinary in many ways, and ordinary in one—it’s a constant work in progress.

The film is often a rough, searching, unfocused piece of work, but at a minimum, it affirms Bell as a talent to watch both as an actress and a writer-director, one with a strong, developing comedic sensibility.

The irony of Prince Avalanche is that its most conventional elements, the ones that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood buddy comedy, are by far its most satisfying. It’s only when Green reaches for the old poetry that the film seems excessively precious and out of balance.

Percy Jackson: Sea Of Monsters continues a tradition of adequacy that could be described as “epic-ish” or “majestic-esque.”

Even in its rougher patches, The Spectacular Now has a disarming earnestness that keeps it on the level, helped along by two superb lead performances that add up to more than their sum.

I Declare War holds off as long as it can before dumping its emotional payload. Until then, the film gets uncomfortable laughs from the games children play, and play for keeps.

Wasteland reveals itself as little more than a bloodless plot engine, but it purrs and hums under the ultra-slick chassis.

Wiig’s new comedy sulks limply along with her, unable to bring the kind of energy that might complement her tendency to underplay every scene.

Only God Forgives suffers from the disconnect between its stylistic high-art archness and its content’s pulp gratuitousness. Refn gives every sequence a hushed consideration, but there’s rarely a sense that he’s earned it with equivalent profundity in theme.

Computer Chess may seem like a novelty item, but it’s that and more, accumulating insight and substance without ever losing the fun of being a lark.

Even with shaggy, semi-improvised projects like Crystal Fairy, there’s a need for some kind of conclusion, and Silva devises one that’s simultaneously terribly contrived and by far the most powerful scene in the movie.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

As a buddy-cop movie, The Heat seems almost deliberately generic, with boilerplate plotting carried across with zero panache. It wagers that McCarthy and Bullock’s comic energy will make all the difference—a smart bet, as it happens.

There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.

Verbinski orchestrates complex action sequences, including two spectacular bits of derring-do on a moving train, with a precision few in Hollywood are capable of pulling off. Yet The Lone Ranger, like his last two Pirates movies, seems conceived to deliver spectacle by the bulk, which means carrying the baggage of multiple subplots for the purpose of multiple climactic sequences.

The film is less about people or this specific herding ritual than about the majesty of the landscape and the interplay between these animals, their keepers, and the dictates of nature itself.

It's glorious while it lasts, but then the film goes back to figuring out how to keep its oversized vessel from taking on water.

Scrub away the gore and the nastier bits of provocation, and Ben Wheatley's Sightseers belongs squarely in the tradition of British classics like "Kind Hearts and Coronets" and "The Ruling Class" — satires that transformed simmering class resentment into brittle, nasty dark comedy.

Bay blankets the film in a tone of smug self-awareness that obscures everything but its bald hypocrisy.

Oblivion occupies an awkward no-man's-land between escapist space adventure and heady science fiction, but it's neither thrilling enough nor intellectually stimulating enough to satisfy devotees of either.

Cross may not earn the broad recognition he deserves for his performance in It's a Disaster, a droll apocalypse comedy of exceedingly modest scale and even more modest commercial appeal. But it's still a master class in how to play the straight man right.

Still, there’s no doubt that To The Wonder is a fans-only proposition, continuing Malick’s evolution (or devolution, for some) from the narrative grounding of "Badlands" to much more abstract, poeticized notions of the human condition.

The Jackie Robinson biopic 42 operates in a box inside of a box—and not the batter’s box, either, because that would imply it has some freedom to swing away. It’s thoroughly embalmed in the glossy lacquer of conventional baseball movies, and limited further by trying to deal with the horrors of racism in that context.

The film is frequently masterful, suggesting the turbulent inner state of an American sociopath who believes himself to be a good guy.

It might be fair to argue that the resonances of Upstream Color are too obscure and internal — many viewers have and will be baffled by it — but it’s the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.

While Raimi’s Stooges aesthetic — which was really more prominently displayed in the sequels than in 1981’s The Evil Dead — isn’t played up here, there’s enough outrageous unreality to make the brutality go down a little easier. It isn’t quite a cartoon, but it’s close enough.

After all, the documentary itself stands as a thrilling testament to the fact that art is — and should be — open to interpretation.

By showing up and not embarrassing itself too much, the film far exceeds the standards established by the likes of the Shelley Long/Corbin Bernsen team-up "Frozen Assets" and 2012’s dire sperm-heist comedy "The Babymakers."

Dickerson passes on the occasion for existential drama and goes for the race-against-the-clock urgency of an ordinary guy trying to crawl out of his predicament. It’s effective enough, but there isn’t much to it.

At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.

Leon isn't a flashy director, but he has an excellent sense of proportion. Gimme the Loot unfolds in a series of loose, funny, naturalistic scenes, but they never trail off into improvisational vapors.

The film itself doesn’t practice what it preaches: From the typically blocky DreamWorks CGI to the emphasis on bruising slapstick over verbal wit, The Croods takes the low road at every opportunity, giving lip service to enlightenment while following a Flintstonian instinct to keep punching the clock at the quarry.

For as studiously as Griffiths avoids cheap exploitation, the film has an overall structure that isn’t as far removed from a Roger Corman “women in prison” movie as it appears.

Nearly everything that happens in Olympus Has Fallen is ludicrous, yet because the fate of the president and the nation hangs in the balance, the crisis is treated with the gravitas of Paul Scofield at the West End.

It's the warm tenor of the film that ultimately rescues it.

All that unsavory business aside, the biggest problem with the third act is how the film discards the novelty of its own premise in order to bring its star into the action. When Berry trades her headset for a rock, it’s the bluntest metaphor imaginable for a film that’s completely lost its mind.

The overall effect is enervating, like a party that grinds on after most of the attendees have either left or passed out. And much like "Kids," the enfant terrible’s breakthrough screenplay, Korine’s film has an unintended moral hysteria, like a warning to parents of what their good girls are doing when they aren’t looking. The message: Keep them locked up. In their bikinis, if necessary.

Walter has the case down cold and arrives at suitably ambiguous conclusions about terrors both real and suggested, but he gets there through a mix of dimly lit interviews and ominous underscoring that wouldn’t be out of place on an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries."

His outrageous, self-destructive journey lands him in a place just as ironic as Rupert Pupkin’s in "The King Of Comedy," but it’s haunting and mysterious, too, reflecting the dream that consumes his life.

It's a cold-blooded business — and all sentiment aside, it's clear that Pineda is as replaceable as anyone.

Much of Oz The Great And Powerful’s fate is tied to James Franco’s performance as Oz, and the center barely holds, with Franco often looking as overwhelmed by the task as he was by his hosting job on Oscar night.

Writer-director David Riker, who previously made the accomplished 1998 Paisan homage The City (La Ciudad), has a great eye for detail: He sketches the narrow boundaries of Cornish’s sad life in Austin expertly while bringing a village square across the border to vivid life. He also gets another fine performance out of Cornish.

Beyond The Hills has a rich understanding of the appeals and perils of religious values that provide structure and meaning to some while seeming cruel and irrational to outsiders. It’s a world within a world, and Mungiu peers from a clear window.

An abysmal sequel that abandons the found-footage concept, along with the pockets of wit and originality that made its predecessor salvageable.

For as long as Park and Wasikowska keep it burbling, it's an intoxicating brew.

It makes a persuasive argument — which it makes easier by not allowing any counterargument — but it’s unpersuasive as a piece of filmmaking. In laying out its case, it’s manipulative and dull by turns.

Though pitched as a thriller, Robinson’s woefully underbudgeted film plays instead like a chamber drama, so simple and unadorned that it could just as easily be staged as an off-off-Broadway play without anyone telling the difference. And that isn’t entirely to the film’s detriment, either: With a cast choked with great character actors like Ed Harris, William Fichtner, and Lance Henriksen, less is sometimes more.

Good horror films are imprinted by the fears and anxieties of the day, converting real-life atrocities into abstracted scares; mediocre ones are imprinted, too, but with trends and commercial formulas. If Dark Skies resurfaced on TV or brain implant 20 or 30 years from now, horror fans would be able to carbon-date the film almost to the month.

Whatever lizard-brain fun might have been had in watching Johnson do battle against a drug cartel is weakened by the occasional hard tug at the social conscience. The film winds up divided against itself.

The entire story hinges on a thinly calibrated twist ending that’s meant to provide emotional weight to Karpovsky’s actions, but instead clarifies them to the point of utter banality. There’s no mystery left to linger.

Modest, personal, and nicely proportioned, Red Flag resembles one of Hong Sang-soo’s self-reflexive doodles about relationships and filmmaking — "Oki’s Movie," in particular — and it wisely doesn’t take too big a bite.

The cutaways to this cop-on-the-edge plot are jarring and lacking in conviction, and when the whole tortured mess comes together in a twist-filled third act, Safe Haven becomes a full-blown calamity.

Until now, the sequels have gotten away with the cynical franchising of John McClane, but A Good Day To Die Hard, the worst entry in the series by far, exposes the hollowness and stupidity of McClane 2.0.

Between the loaded conversations and metaphors, and the phony overlay of a children's fairy tale, The Playroom can't stop telegraphing themes and interpreting itself. There's nothing left for the audience to do.

If nothing else, Shortland gives Rosendahl a star-making platform on par with Cornish’s in "Somersault": She’s a magnetic screen presence who subtly conveys not only the struggle and guilt inherent to her situation, but also a residue of hate that’s carried over from her parents. The actor, like her character, shoulders a heavy burden.

Like his underappreciated "Haywire," Side Effects screws around in its own thriller architecture, toying with feints of structure and clever bits of misdirection, and otherwise playing the audience like a fiddle. At this point in his career, Soderbergh pulls it off with the unpracticed ease of a maestro.

Stevens wants to honor the living legends who have miraculously agreed to appear in his movie, but after spending a full hour treating their characters like cartoons, the about-face into heartfelt slop lacks the necessary gravitas.

The six men have different personalities that suggest varying styles of leadership, but what's remarkable about The Gatekeepers is how they speak in one voice about the moral complexities of their former jobs and their extreme pessimism about the future.

The X-factors tend to be the script and the performances, and those elements largely betray him in Bullet To The Head, which is a perfunctory exercise whenever Hill isn't busying himself with gun battles, ax fights, and other mano-a-mano confrontations. He can only do so much.

At bottom, though, Happy People celebrates the hard-won freedoms that living in the Taiga offers those who are willing to confront its challenges. There are few places on the planet where the strictures of society don't apply, and the trade-off for fending off bears and minus-50-degree weather is the opportunity to lead a pure, solitary life.

Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it.

Benson and Moorhead have made a horror film for jaded aficionados, deconstructing and reconstructing tired elements into a gnarled, distinctive Frankenstein's monster. This monster might ransack a village, but it would have to think about it first.

It's a struggle at times, mostly because the action-movie clichés haven't been weeded out of the script, but the film is cheerfully, irresistibly destructive - an old-fashioned, "Rio Bravo" shoot-'em-up with the hicktown spirit of "Tremors," though it isn't as good as either.

Quartet falls into the common actor-turned-director trap of valuing the performances of fellow actors over all other aesthetic concerns.

The mere presence of a second layer to the story gives Texas Chainsaw 3D an intriguing kick, and it adds a couple moments of visual wit that show a willingness to fiddle around with the genre. Not being irredeemable garbage counts as a modest achievement, but it's a small step in the right direction.

Like other great pastiche artists, Gomes has created a time machine to a cinematic era that never quite existed, so it feels simultaneously borrowed and new.

No one seems to recognize the irony of making a film about corporate rigging that is itself outrageously rigged.

Calling it a mess would be both accurate and pointless, because a tidier comedy would squeeze the life out of this vital, generous blob of a film.

A director known for the icy classicism and genre subversion of films like "Funny Games" and "Caché," Haneke has a pitilessness that could not be more perfect for Amour, which would collapse at any whiff of sentimentality.

Zero Dark Thirty stands to become the dominant narrative about this important historical event, no matter its distortions, composites, or other slippery feints of storytelling. In that, it wields a dangerous power.

Save The Date's achievements are modest - it could be funnier and more affecting, and it ends with a shrug - but the film is wise about sibling relationships, the uncertainty of youth, and smaller matters, like the way people relate to each other after a break-up.

Adapted from a comic thriller by Carl Hiaasen, South Florida's day-glo answer to Elmore Leonard, the film missed the fizzy, beach-friendly fun of Hiaasen's work, and wound up playing the comedy and the suspense at half-speed. It couldn't keep up with its own protagonist.

The film is a bedroom farce without the farce, a fish-out-of-water comedy on sun-cracked lake-bed, a story of fatherly redemption that barely gets past the hair-mussing stage.

A hypnotic 80-minute drift through nocturnal New Orleans that seeks more to pick up on bits of culture and atmosphere than to tell any stories. They blow up the conventions of documentary realism to capture the city's soul, a much more abstract, elusive undertaking.

For a genre film, Killing Them Softly goes to an awfully strange, none-too-subtle place, but the choice to move the '08 election from background to overlay is unusually bold and thought-provoking, too.

Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary "Anvil: The Story Of Anvil" with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature.

Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.

Posey dominates Price Check, mostly for the better: Whatever observations Walker's film makes about the perils of ambition or women in the workplace register entirely through her. She's simply funnier and more interesting than anyone else, and Walker has written her a complex character whose immediate wants are clearer than her long-term ones.

It's the perfect material for Russell, who not only deals perceptively with the dizzying swings of manic depression, but makes it the fabric of a big, generous, happy-making ensemble comedy.

Starlet shows enough of her unbalanced, unsustainable situation to make sense of her connection to Sadie, however frail a ballast her new friend might be. Their need for each other is disarmingly sweet, but far from sticky.

Hur invests the period setting with an eye-popping opulence that's meant to highlight the elite decadence that came before the fall, but his Dangerous Liaisons isn't particularly sophisticated on a political or historical level.

Hits the sweet spot between stunning ineptitude, hilariously dated period touchstones, and a touching naïveté that gives it an odd distinction. As with the other so-bad-it's-good sensations that have toured the midnight circuit over the last few years - "The Room," "Birdemic," "Troll 2" - its awkwardness comes partly from a foreign-born auteur making an American film, and the culture clash plays out for all to see.

There's genuine pain at the core of Heidecker's character - or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside - but the film is keen on obscuring it.

Replace the toy box with the arcade machine, and Wreck-It Ralph is basically a repurposed "Toy Story" movie, suffused with the same mix of adventure and nostalgia and themes of friendship and the existential crises that come with age. A cynic might dismiss the film as reheated leftovers. But that cynic would be wrong, because those leftovers are delicious.

One of the big reasons Flight is so satisfying is that it moves with the no-frills, meat-and-potatoes conventions of a first-rate procedural while being awash in ambiguity.

The lone standout is Linney's performance as the deranged neighbor, whose erratic combination of sexual desperation and extreme vulnerability keeps the film on life support.

Heckerling also struggles woefully with special effects, but even then, she's capable of pulling off a beautiful sequence where Silverstone remembers a specific city block as it's evolved through the ages. Her shambling little comedy never finds a consistent groove, but it's eager to please, and has the ancient gags to do it.