Scott Tobias

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.