Scott Tobias

All would be forgiven if director Brian A. Miller were the next John Woo, but the shootouts and car chases call to mind adjectives like “requisite” and “obligatory,” and the ready-made New Orleans ambience is nonexistent, probably for budgetary reasons.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

It’s false as social document, often gripping as entertainment.

Daniel Dencik’s unusual documentary Expedition To The End Of The World sounds like a grand seafaring adventure, as expeditions to untraversed Arctic territory tend to be, but its tone is much more philosophical.

Abuse Of Weakness is the director’s attempt to account for actions that seem inexplicable, and make the audience understand and sympathize in kind.

The best that could be said of Ragnarok is that it delivers the goods—nice scenery, crisp pacing, the requisite horror and suspense beats—but it needs something, anything, to give it some distinction.

Every part of Wojtowicz’s story is touched by madness, though The Dog doesn’t miss the depression and tragedy that lingers around it.

At a time when the once-dominant romantic comedy is an endangered species, What If proves the formulas can still work, under the right circumstances, and without really needing to tweak the recipe much.

Shlam and Medalia haven’t constructed the film particularly artfully—it’s sluggishly paced, and the two boys at its center aren’t vividly drawn—but Web Junkie is a case where the access is so unexpected and revelatory that it’s a wonder just to have the footage.

It could generously be referred to as a character study about a detective haunted by her past, and a case that forces her to confront that past in Biblical terms. It could less generously be referred to as a pseudo-spiritual thriller that tries to literalize scriptural mythos in the same bloody terms David Fincher’s Seven used to literalize the Seven Deadly Sins, only far less artfully.

When it comes time to get to the bottom of what’s really going on, McDowell and Lader start losing the thread.

A beautiful, mysterious, beguiling cinematic doodle, and an absolute master class in mise-en-scène, unfolding in odd, fragmented frames and precisely choreographed movement within those frames.

Make no mistake: Rich Hill is a social document, and conclusions can and should be drawn from its beautiful, empathetic portrait of life on the fringes. But Tragos and Palermo content themselves with shining a light and leaving it at that.

A streamlined script might have helped. Curran and Winterbottom lose themselves in the soupy business of union shenanigans, an internal investigation and Lou's intervention in a troubled boy's life, but the added complications -- and the talk, talk, talk they require -- take away from the disquieting core of Thompson's story.

Sex Tape is a case study in how little interest American movies—and especially American sex comedies—have in dealing with sex as anything other than a source of cheap giggles and nonstop humiliation.

The two halves of Closed Curtain complement each other, but the first is more compelling than the second, partly because the mysteries of construction trump the grind of deconstruction, and partly because Panahi channeled his anguish more directly and affectingly with This Is Not A Film.

Derrickson gives it everything he’s got, but when a film offers “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” as a spiritual pathway, it’s hard to take seriously.

Writer-director Katrin Gebbe rubs viewers’ faces in this dog dish of a film, with the promise that some sliver of transcendence will redeem it. But it’s all dog dish.

Premature isn’t nearly as inventive and witty as Groundhog Day or Edge Of Tomorrow about finding fresh angles on repeating events, and it overestimates how much the audience might care about the self-improvement of a bland, clueless douchebag.

It’s a call to action in the form of an adoring profile, which is effective (and affecting) strategy, but narrow, propagandistic filmmaking.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

22 Jump Street squeezes every last drop of comic inspiration it can get from Tatum and Hill, as well as the very notion of a sequel to such a superfluous enterprise.

There isn’t a bad scene in Borgman... But van Warmerdam just keeps on teasing and teasing, until the creeping suspicion sets in that teasing is all the film is going to do.

Willow Creek does everything a little bit better than others of its kind. It’s a little wittier, a little more insightful, a little more imaginative, a little scarier.

With just a couple of strong casting choices and a winsome tone, an old formula can still work, and The Grand Seduction comes out of the lab with a disarming readiness to please.

Night Moves is a film of deliberate, gnawing intensity and focus, built around a Jesse Eisenberg performance that doesn’t give much away, at least not easily.

Though it has the dramatic apparatus of fiction, the film unfolds with a documentary-like openness to the world around it.

That’s a lot of concept for a 90-minute horror-comedy, and All Cheerleaders Die handles it with a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can style that matches its tonal schizophrenia.