Scott Tobias

it’s hard to not see the puppet strings above everyone’s heads as Alaimo tugs them into big statements about suburban emptiness, economic flim-flammery, family dysfunction, and other hallmarks of America’s foundational rot.

The film advances some harsh truths about the spoils of money-grubbing savagery. But Cheap Thrills doesn’t take a scolding tone: These lessons come in the form of a rowdy, midnight-movie entertainment that keeps its considerable ambition under wraps.

Though it sounds like a contradiction, the film could be described as both dull and over the top.

Through it all, Gheorghiu finds the perfect pitch between a mother’s love for her child and a kind of pathology.

There’s a sense with Jimmy P. that Desplechin and his co-screenwriters, Julie Peyr and film critic Kent Jones, are doing everything they can to steer away from contrivance and stick as closely to Devereux’s recollection as possible. What they’re left with is a rigorous, keenly intelligent therapy session that’s largely absent of dramatic tension.

Lucky Bastard mostly combines the worst of all worlds: the less-clever-than-it-thinks script of old-school porn, the piercing brightness and flatness of video production, an especially lackluster rendering of the played-out found-footage horror concept.

There’s no harmony at all to the elements tossed into the new remake of RoboCop, but credit screenwriter Joshua Zetumer and director José Padilha for at least having some elements in play.

Co-writer/director Douglas Aarniokoski has a nasty little neo-noir thriller tucked into Nurse 3D, but he buries it in his all-chocolate-all-the-time conceptual sloppiness.

Reitman has placed a not-unreasonable bet that sensual creatures like Winslet and Brolin can convey the passion necessary for their relationship to make sense, but the film carries itself too stiffly, like it’s so afraid of making the wrong choices that it doesn’t make any good ones.

As reticent as Nathan is to cast explicit judgment, the film shows the tragic impasse between a street culture that’s reckless and provocative, and a police force that exacerbates the problem with heavy-handed tactics.

Farmiga and Garcia have a chemistry that’s unassuming and sneaky, and the pleasure they get from each other’s company ultimately proves infectious.

Even when the plot kicks in and the stakes get raised, there’s a casualness to Guiraudie’s approach that’s singular and admirably defiant of genre expectations. He’s setting a scene. Tension insinuates itself later.

The small achievement of Devil’s Due is how much it both exploits the video-cam approach and overcomes some of its limitations.

Keshales and Papushado have great filmmaking chops—as Israeli imports go, this is as far from the austere norm as it gets—but there’s a hollowness at the core of Big Bad Wolves, a creeping sense that they have no clear perspective on they mayhem they’re presenting.

Dekker knows who she is, what she wants to do, and how to get it done, and Maidentrip wisely sails off the tailwinds of her confidence and boundless curiosity.

The tease of 50 gorgeous women fighting to the death has a classic grindhouse appeal, but Raze is strictly a “be careful what you wish for” proposition.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

Since Belfort and his crew are complete knuckleheads, every bit the low-class slobs who bray like animals on the trading floor, The Wolf Of Wall Street may be the funniest film of 2013, rife with gross misbehavior, pranks, and tomfoolery.

Farhadi isn’t interested in judging his characters so much as comprehending them in all their complexity, and registering the consequences of their actions, particularly on children.

Seidl has made an insightful film that’s more about the trials of a young woman’s coming of age than about being overweight.

Her is a 21st-century love story that perfectly captures the mood of the times and finds new inroads into the exhilaration and heartbreak that have existed since the first “I love you.”

While Lenny Cooke’s considerable social and emotional resonance still doesn’t measure up to Hoop Dreams’, the Safdies beautifully evoke the other side of the professional game, the many basketball casualties who don’t get movies made about them.

As director Dominique Benicheti invites the audience to contemplate this way of life—and that’s all the film seeks to accomplish, which is plenty—he reveals the virtues of simplicity, routine, and quietly communing with the natural world.

As a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom proves remarkably complete: It’s a dull, glossy, uncomplicated portrait of a man whose personal and political legacy is marked by serene idealism and shrewd calculation.

Narco Cultura makes it abundantly, forcefully clear that the illicit business of narcocorridos thrives on the illicit business of cartels—and business is still booming.

Freely adapted from Goethe’s two-part play, Sokurov’s Faust is a work of crushing tedium, relieved only by the spare moments of beauty that pop out like dandelions in a washed-out landscape of oppression and grotesquerie.

Little beyond Servillo’s presence gives the film any ballast, which is both asset and liability, freeing Sorrentino to pepper the screen with wild setpieces and fits of inspiration while encouraging a certain shapelessness.

Nebraska is one of Payne’s best films, a near-perfect amalgam of the acrid humor, great local color, and stirring resonances that run through his work.