Sheri Linden

A decidedly upbeat number, centered on a good-hearted character.

Though much of the drama is clunky and flat, the taut, visceral performances by David Oyelowo and Kate Mara never err.

The overwrought plot mechanics are exasperating, but the lead actresses' exquisitely modulated performances get under the skin.

What begins as an intriguing psychological thriller devolves into an addiction drama, growing less interesting as it proceeds and giving costars Dakota Fanning and Theo James little to do.

Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

Though the story is drawn in broad strokes and overloaded with melodrama, director Mat Whitecross' exuberant feature understands the communal joy and personal necessity of rock 'n' roll.

The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

It works mainly in fits and starts, though there's no question that the movie's depiction of the effects of Soviet rule on a nomadic population will be eye-opening for many Western viewers, and deeply resonant for Kazakhstanis.

Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.

This feature debut deals mainly in clichés, never transforming the tough question at its center into compelling cinema.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Director Roger Gual presents little in the way of tantalizing culinary visuals, and that leaves the paper-thin characters as the main course.

The movie has the taut efficiency of a well-constructed crime thriller, while its real-world underpinnings play out with a less convincing sense of urgency.

White's film is a love letter not just to Kelly and the Beatles, but also to postwar working-class Liverpool.

The historical overview they provide is insightful and lucid, yet their polished production intermittently lapses into dry chronology while they bury the lead.

A less muddled, less self-conscious Queen & Slim could have been an indelible waking dream. Instead, it's hit-and-miss. But Waithe and Matsoukas are on to something, and it's the undercurrents rather than the filmmakers' more obvious exertions that hit the mark.

Even with director Mira Nair’s typically vivid sense of place and the charismatic central performances by David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o and a striking newcomer, the film hits every note of plucky positivity so squarely on the head that it leaves little room for audience involvement.

The film offers fascinating glimpses of a hardworking but unhurried way of life, though it doesn't have the powerful dramatic hook of "The Story of the Weeping Camel."

Sunset Song, Davies’ adaptation of a 1932 novel about a Scottish farming family, falls short of the intended cumulative effect, its emotional power undercut by its studied, episodic unfolding.

A decidedly old-fashioned war film that reaches for epic sweep but is often bogged down in cliched drama and two-dimensional characters.

Does offer a few deeply felt moments.

The talking-head commentary, however firsthand, personal and eloquent, can be repetitious, while the filmmaker leaves unnecessary basic information gaps in the story he’s telling. But Midsummer in Newtown is nonetheless an affecting chronicle.

Without pandering to audience sympathy, Silverman's dark shadings lend something unexpected and real to the role.

Though it’s strictly for the faithful, the tween-friendly mix of cute and earnest has a forthright sharpness and is never cloying.

A choppily told tribute to the Apollo astronauts that makes striking use of never-before-seen archival images.

Starting out with a bracing, off-kilter wryness, Ove moves steadily, and disappointingly, toward the crowd-pleasing center.

The wan drama is enlivened by bursts of black comedy, some bits more effective than others, and though it ultimately disappoints, there's promise in the understated creepiness of Riley Stearns' debut feature.

[Gottsagen's] sensibility infuses the modern-day fable with an engaging forthrightness. But the unequivocal material often sticks close to the surface, and the film built around him, for all its physical sweep, can feel constricted by obviousness.

As a glimpse at the nitty-gritty of building a music career in the '60s and '70s, the film is instructive, though the record-by-record trajectory could have been tighter. Tracing the ups and downs and stops and starts, Firmager sometimes lands in the weeds and loses the beat. The film is strongest in its portrait of the formative years of Quatro's career and their emotional residue, which turns out to be the core of this chronicle.

Sophie Deraspe's film is a compelling anatomy of an Internet hoax.

It's an affectionate and admiring collection of moments, but the director's wobbly choreography never locates a dramatic core for this corps' story.

Rey, whose previous features include Unexpected and Empire Builder (released when she was married to fellow director Joe Swanberg and used his last name), has a knack for recognizing everyday stabs of awkwardness and turning throwaway lines into grace notes.

The simple but affecting film begins a weeklong award-qualifying run Friday before opening in stateside art houses Jan. 21, and is worth a look for its gutsy and commanding central performance.

Concerned mainly with the mechanics of the undertaking, the movie is less an incisive chronicle than a galvanizing tool for parents who are, understandably, frustrated with the system.

As to truly exploring the phenomenon of a live-tweeted collective fiction, the documentary makes a couple of intriguing observations but doesn't look far beyond the metrics, content to exult in the wow factor of it all, which admittedly is considerable.

Hubbell lays the groundwork for a nuts-and-bolts examination of changes over the decades in treatment and teaching techniques. In the present tense, however, the first-person aspect of his documentary can veer toward the cutesy.

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

The movie could have made its points — war is bad; music is the universal language — in half the time. But the harmonies are sweet, the acoustic picking impressive.

"Him" and "Her" are hardly groundbreaking cinema, but they are more rewarding than "Them."

Conventional dramatic hooks have no place in Garrel's filmography, so it's not surprising that his new movie is more atmospheric than involving, or that the two beautiful bed heads at its center hardly invite emotional connection.

Furiously crossing and double-crossing, the two main story lines never quite fuse or comment on each other.

Tonal swerves can be a source of useful friction; here they’re simply awkward, and Robespierre’s efforts to meld sentiment and laughs grow increasingly strained.

Cranston turns every moment of duplicity, which is to say nearly every scene of The Infiltrator, into an emotionally textured high-wire act.

The rare feature to be shot on location in Gaza, The Idol offers implicit commentary on everyday deprivations and work-arounds. Yet the screenplay stumbles when it plants self-conscious observations in the mouths of characters of all ages.

Stars Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan are game, as is the lineup of mostly wasted supporting actors. But what might have been a snappy short is interminable at feature length, the mayhem-in-suburbia conceit generating few laughs as it stomps along.

Fascinating anecdotes unfold, illuminating the spontaneity and daring that went into producing the groundbreaking periodical.

As clunky as the movie can feel, there’s a winning toughness to its unsentimental view of childhood and its nostalgia for a pre-digital age.

Chilling Kafkaesque encounters give way to portrayals of thuggish cops bordering on caricature. In distractingly blunt ways, the film emphasizes what's already powerfully clear: the monstrousness of Mariam's situation and her courage.

A modestly scaled feature whose plainspoken sincerity is a hindrance as well as a strength.

Though Dockendorf doesn’t deliver the intended dramatic punch, he’s fully in sync with his lead characters, and Cook and Johnson are never less than engaging.

On the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Well-meaning but implausible story.

Mumblecore meets Arthur Conan Doyle in the ambitious, if not always satisfying, Cold Weather.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

It can feel repetitive and oversimplified. Aesthetically, though, it has an aching, dreamlike pull, constructing a panoramic view of history through the prism of collective and personal memory.

Forbes pushes the positivity a bit insistently, yet one of the most appealing aspects of her film is its depiction of kids thriving in an unorthodox household.

The setting is striking, the cast impressive. But Two Men in Town, a drama that's built on dread and circles the question of redemption for a newly released prisoner, falls short of the mythic territory it aspires to.

[Gibney's] chronicle informs rather than inspires, but it's a solid introduction to a fascinating figure.

Distractingly lovely to look at, the film can't make Sangaile's struggles or triumphs matter. Its soaring conclusion feels anticlimactic, the story drifting off into air.

The knack for biting dialogue that Mills brought to Guidance is still evident, although his new effort can’t match the bracing sting of his wickedly funny debut.

Taking satiric aim at a familiar target, conformity, Australian playwright Tony McNamara's film debut is by turns incisive and broad.

Hall and Brown are a glorious kick to watch, their physicality at times bordering on slapstick.

The drama works only in fits and starts. The vague danger that shapes it, and the narrative's underlying emotional intricacies, are too often explained rather than felt.

Wavers between would-be satire and romantic drama, inhabiting neither mode convincingly.

A story that might have been alive with messy complexity is instead genial and polite.

The romance at the movie’s core doesn’t deliver the intended emotional impact, but there’s a tender, potent resonance to other aspects of the story.

We know the achievements and victories of the era Nagy depicts, and yet, because she and her fine cast bring the story to such vivid, immediate life, the final moments of Call Jane are powerful with unanticipated joy.

Dunne creates a full-blooded character. The film around him, unfortunately, takes low-key to the realm of tepid.

Delivering visual drama and understated character study, sometimes in disappointingly formulaic fashion, the feature has its incisive moments but falls short as both epic and intimate portrait.

The setting abounds in beauty, and the storytelling abounds in obvious cues that mute the intended suspense, if not the horror.

Thomas’ direction, especially of the villainous roles, gives a lot of the action a self-conscious, not-quite-real quality. Some aspects of the movie’s intentional artifice work better than others.

The central drama never fully engages, but the jolts that Banshee delivers are check-the-locks scary.

Amid the not-so-troubling setbacks, unbelievable triumphs and perpetual spring break, the movie takes one or two nice twists.

Shepard’s reach might exceed her grasp, but there’s no question that she takes risks and is a filmmaker of notable promise.

Fine performances and bristling language compel in this overlong, often off-putting but well-observed New York story.

A shiver of cosmic comedy runs through the film's tragic turns.

Two Lovers and a Bear is above all thrillingly cinematic, even when its elements of lived-in intensity and jokey fantasy refuse to coalesce.

The decidedly irreverent nature of much of the proceedings will be a turnoff to some viewers, a tonic to others.

The feature spikes its lonesome mood with shots of dry humor, animated sequences and flashbacks — at times overplaying its hand, even as Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff wordlessly convey all that needs to be said.

But for all its vividly detailed eccentricity, the movie, like Abby, connects the dots rather too easily. As Clifton Hill digs deeper into exceedingly sordid stuff, it doesn't dish up the kind of aha moments or chilling frissons that would lift the story from clever contrivance — until a final, delicious twist pulls the rug out from under this richly atmospheric but not always convincing tale.

Ultimately Fear X feels more like an intellectual exercise than a convincing drama.

The story itself finally feels lost beneath the levels of artifice rather than heightened by it.

It’s the glimmers of penetrating observation that make the overload of clichés so frustrating in Onah’s first feature, and suggest better things for his second.

It’s Wang’s eye for social realities, brought to life by her cast, that gives her film its edge.

It's great to look at, nearly giddy with pop-culture love, and its particulars are intriguing. But those pieces — by turns weird, soulful and exhilarating — merely accumulate, when they should be generating magic.

Despite effective moments, VanAlkemade's film is too diffuse. He gives us snippets of the group's spirited performances, but their effect on audiences remains unclear.

At its strongest, Dark Night taps into the emptiness, hurt and longing beneath the pings and swipes of our "connected" world. But for all its artfulness, the film doesn’t shed light so much as push buttons.

Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity. The actors effortlessly entwine the droll and the ingenuous, but as Ulman juggles more characters and more plot angles than in her first movie, there isn’t necessarily more payoff.

In Ashok's reunion with the love of his life (Mary Steenburgen) — the chance to see her after many years is the true reason for his trip — the film taps into a tender wistfulness, Steenburgen making her character's every glance and hesitation resonate with emotion.

For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.

If director Emmanuelle Bercot's feature isn't always dramatically satisfying, it is fueled by the fine, flinty chemistry of Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and newcomer Rod Paradot.

The movie both embraces and questions the romance of heroism, a provocative paradox that would have had more dramatic oomph if the screenplay were less staid, the characters more fully fleshed.

The ace cast provides delicious moments, to be sure, but mainly they're playing caricatures in search of a compelling plot.

It's a plot that never takes hold, a mystery devoid of suspense... But the actors' unforced chemistry defies the artifice.

Doesn't depart from the inspirational coming-of-age formula. But it has got enough heart and disco-fever exuberance to connect with audiences.

The film's insistence on laughter through the tears too often feels strained.

With its softball insights about midlife reinvention and its quasi-illuminating glances across the cultural and class divide, the movie takes its place, a la the similarly contrived The Visitor, on the spectrum of It’s Never Too Late character studies.

Lerner alternates between well-observed character detail and clunky mystery-solving developments.