Sheri Linden

Heavy-handedness prevails, with the schmaltzy original score as unconvincing as the script. An over-reliance on song, from pop to Puccini to Ellington to hip-hop, doesn't compensate for what's lacking in the storytelling.

Augurs well for dazzling visual work but struggles mightily on the storytelling front.

Straight out of the slice-and-dice school of filmmaking, Vantage Point fractures chronology and perspective in a vain attempt to disguise its flimsiness.

[Guo's] film, which at first hints at a wry critique of materialism but ends up reveling in it, is a timely snapshot of aspirational glitz in the big city.

As a portrait of female strength and a celebration of the artistic spirit, Leonie too seldom comes fully alive.

With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand.

Terrific performances by Anthony LaPaglia, Eric Stoltz and Caroleen Feeney infuse this well-written comic drama with a realistic ease.

Garcia never gets a grasp on her protagonist’s contradictions, or those of her story — certainly not enough to pull off the movie’s jaw-dropper of a twist. But she conjures a powerful sensuality, and Cotillard burns ferociously bright, even when the center does not hold.

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.

Strong performances by Scott Mechlowicz as Millman and Nick Nolte as the mysterious mechanic who changes his life ground the film in effective drama.

With director Jerome Enrico mining the material for only the most obvious gags, the social commentary of the central joke never rises to the level of hard-hitting satire, instead settling on a broadly observed collection of types.

The promise of a stylish psychological thriller is squandered in Camera Obscura, which lapses into an ordinary, wearying tale of a nice guy in over his head with ruthless criminals.

The action unwinds with the mechanical artifice of a creaky play, though Nadda creates a few strikingly cinematic moments.

The picture's quiet performances and occasionally surprising moments take it just far enough off the beaten path to make it more than a transparently formulaic feel-good story.

With its gauzily surreal touches, Woodshock reflects the Mulleavys’ romantic flair for texture and embellishment. But as Theresa’s guilt and self-medication mount, along with the film’s profoundly muddled ideas about assisted suicide, the curated trance grows mind-numbing. It’s a death trip with pretty lingerie.

A frequently charming, if ultimately slight, coming-of-age tale.

Though the intended hilarity is forced and flat, there's a sweetness to the silliness.

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

However masterful, the first-rate stunt work, effects, action cinematography and cutting (by no less than three editors) lose impact through sheer repetition.

Solomon crafts a quality horror piece from strong performances and effects. The chief disappointment of An American Haunting is that it doesn't exploit more opportunities for the sublime subtlety of performances by Sissy Spacek and, especially, Donald Sutherland.

The good news is that Christopher Walken, resplendent in purple silk, isn't the film's sole redeeming element. The bad news is that even his arch-villain can't save Balls of Fury from losing bounce as the story proceeds.

Marshall's predilection for romantic fairy tales is much in evidence, though the comedy registers in a lower key than it did in such hits as "Pretty Woman" and "Runaway Bride."

With its flat punch lines, formulaic action and undercooked mélange of messages — touching on everything from factory farming to genocide — the film waddles awkwardly.

First-time actor Garrett is better at conveying Paganini's artistic sensitivity and self-indulgence than his innovative fire. When he picks up the fiddle, though, he speaks with eloquent authority.

A drama that struggles to breathe life into its death-themed narrative.

The frenetic pace detracts from the film's wealth of personalities and vivid visuals. There's the unshakable sense that Rugrats Go Wild is trying too hard to please kids and adults and as a result falls somewhat short for both sets of viewers.

More than a gimmick, that self-conscious visual strategy suits the self-impressed creative-class characters, even as it is, finally, more interesting than they are.

Billy and Buddy manages to maintain the kind of brisk giddiness that many animated films struggle to achieve. But as family fare with a few unsettling Gallic touches, the boy-and-his-dog escapade is an odd fit.

It arrives not as a lusty tale in full bloom but as a tastefully arranged still life, in search of an animating spark.

Elegy . . . embraces the emotional messiness of a heart-wringing country song, but lacks a haunting refrain to get under your skin.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

Well-meaning but woefully unconvincing.

This inspirational sports drama unfolds in such generic fashion that it feels contrived more often than it rings true.

Like many a biopic before it, Winnie Mandela shoehorns an exceptional life into the standard template of a highlights reel, lurching from one Important Moment to the next.

Rooney Mara and Theo James deliver their most richly nuanced screen work to date in the drama, a memory piece whose true subject is Ireland’s tangled, bloody history and the Church’s toxic paternalism toward women.

Full of insights on love and sex -- which will have more resonance for lesbians but pack a universal punch.

In terms of character and plot, not one element of the intended wild ride escapes self-consciousness or becomes the least bit involving.

The story unfolds in large part through awkward contrivance.

American writer-director Angad Aulakh tries to agitate the pensive set-up with sex and a supposed mystery that never raises the pulse. The Bergman-esque posturing falls so far short of the Swedish master that it wouldn’t even qualify as accidental parody.

A meandering journey, too tepid to stir up the feelings of yearning and rebellion that it aims to evoke.

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

The movie is, by and large, smarter than the gross-out tactics that pass for hilarity in many mainstream adult comedies.

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

Assembling this vehicle for his young clients, music producer/manager/video director Christopher B. Stokes has attached an anemic plot to a series of dynamic hip-hop dance sequences.

The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.

First-time director Daniel Duran, working from a screenplay by Oscar Torres that abounds in the maudlin and risible, isn't able to lift the ham-handed material to a place where it might ring true.

McAvoy and Radcliffe are actors with charm to burn, but it’s only in brief moments that their characterizations cut through the film’s pandemonium, while the jokes they’re called upon to deliver land with a thud.

McGuinness has a commendable grasp of visual textures and rhythms. It will be interesting to see what she does with a stronger story to tell. Here, reaching for dramatic effect, she comes up empty.

In an awkward split-personality way, it works some of the time.

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

Even when Gormican’s material tries too hard to be wackily crude, and not hard enough to make dramatic sense, the actors suggest layers of experience that help to fill in the gaps.

Boilerplate shootouts and conflagrations get the better of the movie's second half, but for the most part, first-time director Park Hong-soo strikes the right balance between take-no-prisoners espionage and teenage angst.

Generally succeeds -- in hit-and-miss fashion -- at bridging the gap between unlikable jerk and misunderstood good guy, though it's still something of a leap to leading-man territory.

Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn play the guys they always play in this sci-fi comedy misfire.

This comedy whodunit generates more laughs than its predecessor, which is to say, two or three.

Newcomer Myles Truitt inhabits the role with an earthbound soulfulness — what you might call the opposite of heroic flash — and even when the film’s progress feels more mechanical than organic, he’s easy to root for.

The unconsummated attraction between best friends played by Carice van Houten and Hanna Alström clearly is meant to be its emotional pulse. Yet however sensitive the two leads' performances, The Affair rarely gathers the necessary intensity.

Simon Pegg is likably smart and obnoxious as the fish-out-of-water Brit in high-gloss Manhattan, but he's swimming upstream in a feature that substitutes slapstick for scathing wit.

The handsomely downbeat atmospherics overwhelm its themes of love, parenthood, crime and punishment. The narrative doesn't quite coalesce, and except for a few late-in-the-proceedings moments, it doesn't deliver the grim, indelible shivers of the best noir.

Despite a finely wrought lead performance by Dakota Fanning, the drama feels more like the stuff of a mild — and dated — YA novel than an involving exploration of female experience.

What's missing in this Kitchen is heat. A B-movie summer diversion at best, it's more a collection of genre tropes than an involving crime drama.

A winningly restrained lead performance by Tommy Lee Jones, who also exec produced, isn't enough to put the film on the boxoffice scoreboard.

The finely observed moments in Stateside accumulate little emotional power. The promise of something startling and compelling goes unfulfilled, and the arc of the central love story isn't interesting enough to sustain the drama.

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

Though it's built around a kernel of tender feeling, the comedy never transcends its basic contrivance.

The drama is undone by hyperventilating poetics and a busy time-hopping structure.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

Even as agile a performer as Sandra Bullock seems to be straining here amid the repetitive jokes and muddled girl-power message.

Pleasant and atmospheric family romp, offering enough mildly chilling thrills to keep everyone entertained during its brief running time.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

Depp is convincingly vulnerable and forlorn, all while maintaining the Hatter’s otherworldly eccentricity, and Wasikowska has the requisite grit. But Alice’s mission feels as manufactured as the story’s whatsits and doodads, as Bobin struggles to infuse make-believe with emotion.

A few smart laughs hint at what might have been, but thanks to sitcom-y mugging and a tepidness beneath the intended hilarity, David E. Talbert’s romantic comedy is stuck in a holding pattern for much of its running time.

If state-of-the-art cross-gender fat suits and drunken Chihuahuas were the stuff of comic genius, Big Momma's House 2 still wouldn't be very funny.

Whatever emotional depths filmmaker Jessica Goldberg hopes to suggest, there's nothing stirring beneath the movie's static surface.

Yet another Hollywood romantic comedy that's all but devoid of romance and laughs.

Character eccentricities and off-kilter group dynamics play out with a comic vengeance.

The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.

Compounding the sense of predictability and deja vu is the presence of well-known TV actors portraying the sorts of characters they've perfected on the small screen.

A light touch keeps the film from being an ordeal, but the story's trajectory is as predictable as the setup is contrived.

A drama that plays out as an overdetermined thesis, with Genovese herself (Christina Brucato) a footnote to the darkly stylized plunge into lives of quiet desperation.

Starts out as an exuberant romp but soon gets trapped in a holding pattern of dumb sex and toilet jokes.

Girls ages 6-14 will get a charge from the fashion show, animation effects and, to a lesser degree, the cartoonish antics. But like most adolescent histrionics, the pic's impact on adults will be limited to mild amusement alternating with annoyance.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

Familiar but never overly broad, this well-cast, crowd-pleasing comedy benefits from a low-key emphasis on character over high jinks.

Actual footage of Afghanistan makes it an interesting experiment, but as a dramatic thriller, the story of an American documaker is not as taut or compelling as it could be; instead, it's often confusing and irritating.

The movie is character-driven every step of the way. That’s why, even if the world created by Jones and his talented design collaborators, both old-school physical and cutting-edge digital, isn’t seamlessly believable so much as staggeringly crafted, it casts a spell.

Jeremy Leven's attempt at old-school romantic comedy, set in a postcard-pretty tourist's vision of Paris, is more of a foolish plod than a weightless rollick.

Too squeaky-clean to convey the turbulence of the period.

The movie is a letdown, stringing together pointless episodes to little effect. It's the kind of thinly conceived, quirk-for-quirk's-sake indie that gives indies a bad name.

Thanks to Jon Cryer’s likable-schlemiel shtick, a lost-cause rom-com is more watchable than it has any right to be. But that’s not enough to make Hit by Lightning remotely involving.

Embodying the same wholesomeness that has informed most of his screen work, gross-out comedies included, it feels like a tentative next step in Sandler’s evolving screen persona, one that has gone from good-hearted dolt to bumbling man-child to middle-aged father.

The starry chemistry of leads Ansel Elgort and Chloë Grace Moretz injects a modicum of energy into the coming-of-age drama, whose elements of romance, crime and smart-kid angst never coalesce.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

At various moments throughout the movie, Turner and McDermott suggest something far more complicated and messy than the noir-tinged exercise that unfolds.

Rudd is an underappreciated comic actor, and his line readings are the best thing in the film, but the bland role barely taps his talent. Amid the rest of the cast's one-note posing, his scenes with a parrot have a spontaneity and wit otherwise in short supply.

The movie opens with the suggestion that it will address the generational divide, but it has nothing of substance to say.

It offers January moviegoers some guilty-pleasure thrills and laughs, while falling way short of its potential on both the dramatic and the camp fronts.

Doesn't serve up enough laughs to build a theatrical following but could find life on video as a takeout item.

At the expense of emotional depth, Augusto emphasizes the story's sensory aspects. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's overkill.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

As the film veers between cartoonish and earnest, it doesn't so much find bliss as try very hard to manufacture it.

Aims for whimsy and poignancy and mostly comes up empty.

A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.

Although the film loses its way in the late going with a preponderance of melodramatic elements that dilute the more compelling social message, for much of its running time it packs a visceral punch, thanks in large part to a strong cast headed by LisaRaye, N'Bushe Wright and Mos Def.

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

Has the feel of a contemporary screwball romance, if not the crackling one-liners of classic screwball. But Lindsay Lohan and Chris Pine make a charming star-crossed couple, and tweens and teens will find enough plot reversals to keep them hooked.

Aaron Zigman’s score provides reassuring downhome uplift — perhaps a necessary element in a tale of impossible, perfect love, where everything happens for a reason and is as it should be, even when it’s terrible.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

Tries to be too many things, none very convincingly: plea for tolerance, docu-style character study, old-fashioned weepie.

A seemingly tourist-bureau-sanctioned travelogue posing as a romantic drama.

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

Does offer a few deeply felt moments.

Amongst the cardboard-cutout supporting characters, Lauren Graham brings a welcome deadpan sensibility to the overeager proceedings.

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.

Mistaking arrested development for enlightened innocence, Waiting for Forever is an indigestible hash of whimsy, drama, romance and, for good measure, crime.

Carmine Gaeta and Luke Davies' screenplay is constructed from plot mechanics, and the emotional stakes grow less convincing with every twist of the screw.

An oddity as awkward as its title, Angels With Angles is writer-director-star Scott Edmund Lane's would-be valentine to old-school showbiz comics, wrapped in a silly adventure-romance involving Cuban cigars and, yes, Fidel Castro.

Without creating fully fleshed characters or truly involving conflict, the film aims instead to provoke howls of recognition and tears of gratitude by appealing to very basic notions of parent-child love.

Ratcheting up Eddie’s malevolence in ways large and small, Cage delivers the latest installment in his singularly unfettered brand of over-the-top screen madness.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

Breaking News in Yuba County features a pitch-perfect Janney at the center of a game cast of well-knowns. Yet as it fumbles through its unwieldy mix of crime-caper farce, social commentary and black comedy, the genre it most solidly nails is the one that poses the burning question "Why did so many accomplished actors sign on to this?"

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

This thin concoction of domestic drama and thriller suspense won't hold up after the curiosity factor runs its brief course. Neither Robert De Niro nor a phalanx of a dozen producers can deliver Godsend from unintentional comedy.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

A collection of feeble jokes in the service of green themes. Sustainability never looked so stupid.

But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

Having tackled treacherous terrain to film Hayata's story, the filmmakers miss the opportunity to deliver a scorching testament to the dangers and passions that drive the saga.

It's no wonder that the film's strongest sequence, visually and dramatically, involves none of these characters. It's a flashback to the construction of St. Peter's that explains the origins of Eden's centuries-long reign on his dark throne.

Montiel treats his story's happily unsung oddballs with sincere affection. He doesn't hold them up to ridicule, or insist that they snap out of their quirkiness and conform. But he doesn't quite know what to do with them.

Finally, a postfeminist multicultural musical extravaganza for 8-year-old girls. Is Bratz not the most totally stylin' movie ever? Grownups won't think so, but for their daughters who share a "passion for fashion" with the dolls that are giving Barbie a run for her money, it will be the event of the season.

This tale of the theater could have used more time on the road.

Nick Cannon, playing an L.A. cop who goes undercover as a prep school student, provides the few sparks this wan action-comedy can muster.

To call Don Peyote a mess would be putting too fine a point on it.

The absurdist comedy Oconomowoc is not only named after a place but dedicated to it — “a city we love very much,” the end credits declare of the titular Wisconsin town — so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s not more there there.

The sequel retains not only the same gimmicky premise as the original but its preference for cliche-ridden dialogue and flat-footed comedy as well.

Cooper weaves a few well-placed observations about gun culture and male condescension into the heavy-handed mess.

If the ostensible thriller contained a single believable moment, let alone an ounce of suspense, its nonsensical final twist might be grounds for concern.

Bottom line: A soft-hearted gross-out pic. If you're not a male between 17 and 23 and don't find the chance to see R-rated rejects from "America's Funniest Home Videos" a good thing, The Long Weekend will be a long and pointless haul.

For more than half the film's running time, it's an engaging one. Centering on the boys' hardscrabble formative years, first-time director Breno Silveira delivers an assured first hour before losing grasp of his material.

At once impressionistic and precise,The Tiniest Place (El Lugar más pequeño) is a beautifully rendered memory piece that insists on the necessity of memory.

Anyone seeking an empty-headed, derivative joy ride through crime-comedy conventions could do far worse than Silver Case, a brisk, good-looking and never dull B movie.

The impulse to profile "the world's most sexualized women" is a worthy one. But little sense of individuality emerges in Aroused.

Though his treatment of the subject is often superficial, Perlman makes a clear argument for the broader implications, especially for Western consumers.

This is the straightforward story of a family facing adversity head-on and making inroads against a rare disease.

Peck celebrates Abargil as an impassioned and inspiring advocate while making clear the emotional complexities of her single-mindedness.

Between the heavy-handed lines, director Adrian Popovici provides telling glimpses of a provincial, aggressively retrograde attitude toward women and the seedy nightclubs where they're preyed on. He elicits uneven performances from a cast working in several languages.

Director Kim Hyun-seok, who until now has worked chiefly in romantic comedy, deploys visual effects and low-key performances in an efficiently told, character-driven exploration of immortality, hubris and human folly.

Concerned more with inspirational messages than dramatic subtlety, it remains an item best suited to believers.

With its developers-versus-ranchers intrigue and touches of magic realism, the movie ends up playing like a mild-tempered oddity.

Life Is Strange is unfocused yet intermittently effective as an illustrated oral history.

The English dubbing is far from picture-perfect, with uneven voice performances and choppy synchronization dulling some of the material’s spark.

Part of the unpredictable pleasure of Bible Quiz is its unanswered questions.

Elliptical storytelling is both a strength and a weakness in a visually striking mystery thriller.

The comedy unfolds mostly in real time, but its grasp of real human behavior is shaky.

Though the film's second half could be tighter, the details and atmosphere ring true throughout, especially in the walking-wounded chemistry between Seimetz and Roberts' tentative dreamers.

Droll, unforced humor and low-magnitude emotional tremors register persuasively thanks to the natural performances of the three leads.

Hong Kong director and co-writer Pang Ho-Cheung sends up gender stereotypes and reinforces them in his contemporary yet not quite fresh confection, zeroing in on certain women's girlie wiles.

An actors' piece, director Michael Patrick Kelly's first narrative feature registers low on the cinematic-oomph scale, the production's low budget sometimes all too evident. Its aim is true, though, and Kathleen Chalfant infuses the lead role with an elegant ferocity.

Immersive in ways that not many movies can claim, Humpback Whales is a prime example of the power of large-format documentaries to educate, delight and inspire.

Despite its clumsiness, the film conveys the melding of modern and ancient, sensuous and sacred.

Except for a reliably flavorful turn by John Hawkes, compelling in a few key scenes as Henry's accomplice, The Pardon remains stubbornly uninvolving.

This introduction to the Buddha's Eightfold Path is often clever and occasionally exasperating.

Despite the more forced and obvious aspects of the story, Barrial taps into the everyday reality of his characters’ New York with an impressive immediacy, abetted by especially fine contributions from cinematographer Luca Del Puppo and composers Lili Haydn and Christopher Westlake.

Like the young social activists at its center, the documentary Radicalized is propelled by a ragged energy, a fuel that's equal parts outrage and idealism.

Madsen brings our collective sense of identity into sharp relief through the lens of what could be called a first date with mysterious beings.

This Isn’t Funny is insightful and quick-witted, a romance that take chances while its lovers learn to do the same.

New Orleans locations and stirring tunes lend texture, intermittently breaking through the film's overriding flatness.

By turns earnest and profane, the story of three twentysomethings' Sin City sortie contains flashes of wit.... But this road is lined with clichés and blunt dialogue, the emotional shifts all too neatly underlined by Death Cab for Cutie tracks.

If you’re looking for a brilliant talking-animal film, it ain’t this one, babe, but it’ll do — specifically as a lead-in to potential pet adoptions; the filmmakers are partnering with rescue groups for opening-weekend events.

Less compelling as a thriller than as a trip through a mind tormented by loss, the film depends on a minimum of dialogue, with extended sequences of wordless action.

Whether founder and conductor Favio Chávez has found deep-pocketed donors or is involved in constant fundraising efforts, the film offers no clue. But it leaves no doubt that Chávez’s visionary cause is one to celebrate.

His screenplay strikes universal chords, but with his preference for constant commentary over dramatic action, Schwartz doesn’t quite translate those feelings into involving cinema. Mainly he oversells them.

Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.

The Last Film Festival is stuck in a loop of painfully silly humor, with stars Dennis Hopper and Jacqueline Bisset offering glimmers of the satire that might have been.

Had Brown (Race You to the Bottom, The Blue Tooth Virgin) found a way to ingrain his ideas in the various relationships rather than spelling them out, the movie might have found a compelling groove.

With the same clarity and fluency he brought to far sunnier material in “Casting By,” Donahue pinpoints the devastating intersection of personal trauma and institutional neglect in an age of perpetual war.

More succinct writing and tighter editing could have yielded a solid B picture.

Though its mix of the loopy, the broad and the deadpan is uneven, its story of American business designs on a tiny Polynesian nation still has satirical bite.

Though the movie’s well cast, its central story rarely shakes off the derivative cloak to become involving. But Ron Livingston’s turn as a sorrowful Elvis Presley is a quiet revelation.

Along the way, the film stares unblinkingly, but with tenderness, at late-middle-age questions of career, identity and the torturous question of whether to let go of a dream that’s not paying off.

The high concept outshines the execution; it’s easy to see how a significantly slimmed-down and sharpened version of the overlong feature might have been a small-time contender.

The movie struggles to generate the slightest tension around the question of who’s playing whom, but the real question is, Why bother?

The film is as vibrant as it is personal and urgent.

At its strongest, the movie dissects such pat notions as “closure” and “moving on” with wit and intelligence.

It’s tricky, to put it mildly, to use suicidal impulses as a story engine for a comedy, and director Rob Spera and screenwriter Jared Rappaport don’t quite pull it off as they navigate the middle ground between dark humor and emotional catharsis.

Though the shifts can be abrupt, the film provides an overview of a huge topic with admirable concision.

Had Mader focused on fewer plot strands, he might have found a more effective balance. Whatever metaphysical poetry Displacement could have held is lost amid its over-explained and underwhelming search for the “negation point.”

Combining guardedness and openheartedness in unpredictable ways, Kronerova and Novy deliver exceptional performances, turning the crystal-clear metaphor of ice swimming into a full-blooded emotional experience.

A work of deep but unsentimental optimism, Wrestling Jerusalem gives us plenty to wrestle with, but presents it at such a relentless clip, in such self-conscious fashion, that it becomes wearying rather than involving.

With its many story strands and flat direction, the movie lacks a pulse, its ambitious hodgepodge of concepts refusing to jell.

Love of God and dog can be powerful things, but in this uncinematic telling, they fail to inspire.

The clunky organization and very basic production values give way to something inspiring.

Adding wrestling to the rom-com mix doesn't quite disguise how by-the-numbers this girl-meets-girl story is. But with its likable characters, local color and cross-cultural sparks, "Signature Move" has unsentimental sweetness and pluck.

Unlike many issue-oriented movies, the artfully crafted film isn’t designed to stir up outrage or sympathy through emotional engagement. At its strongest it’s an unpredictable ride with a winningly sharp absurdist slant; at its weakest, it leans too hard on pointed symbolism.

Characters say precisely what they mean in the film, its flat dialogue a shortcoming not countered by the bland central performances of Juan Riedinger (Narcos) and Julie Lynn Mortensen, in her feature debut.

We all like to imagine ourselves as brave resisters. Pomsel's unapologetic account of being "one of the cowards" is a haunting, ever-timely reminder of how easy it can be to cash the paycheck and look the other way.

Above all, it’s the warm, searching conversations between father and daughter, whether they’re seated side by side or she’s questioning him from behind the camera, that give the documentary its poignant immediacy.

To prepare himself for the big leap back onstage, DiMaggio talks to friends from the New York comedy scene of the ’80s, many of them now household names. Their conversations, filled with smart and spirited observations about showbiz and the business of life, are the heart of this engaging film, and a delight.

With its lyrical sense of place and terrific lead duo of Johnston and Rene Cruz, it's a strong example of low-budget regional filmmaking.

Beyond its eye-opening archival material, the flawed but rich mix of personal history and showbiz annals is an illuminating reminder of how quickly the first (or best-promoted) story becomes the official story, and how easily biographers' career-boosting conjectures are calcified into "fact."

Reaching for a memorable blend of whimsy and portent, Stine has come up with something that feels scattered and decidedly lite. Yet the glimmers of promise in Virginia Minnesota suggest that with a more streamlined, focused narrative, he could spin a Midwestern yarn to remember.

A winning combination of thoughtfulness and exuberance.

Even when the story feels strained, the chemistry among the performers has oomph as their characters taunt one another, celebrate big wins, ride out setbacks and mastermind double-crosses. And the uneven shenanigans sail home smoothly with an exhilarating and ultra-satisfying switcheroo.

I Am Not Alone is an inspiring portrait of democratic self-determination.

Though its running time is brief and a lot of the writing is sharp, the tug-of-war between a onetime literary lion and his wide-eyed No. 1 fan lacks the necessary tension to make the drama's outcome matter.

Through the Night is both celebration and indictment. A sympathetic depiction of "women's work," in all its unsung dignity, it's also a quietly damning portrait of a merciless economy's effect on working-class mothers — particularly black women and Latinas, who often must work taking care of other people's children in order to feed their own.

The day-to-day takes on an understated eeriness that matches the unarticulated ache of the bereaved.

Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained performance as an astute professional who hasn’t time for own vulnerability.

Bursting with passion, sly humor, satirical swipes and the inescapable heartbeat of insurgency — most of the film was shot in 1968 San Francisco — it’s the life-loving tale of a wise innocent abroad, and the not exactly warm reception he receives

Whether the characters are forthright or devious, all the performances are in sync with the rugged seclusion of the setting, as is the rustic-meets-old-timey aesthetic of the production design (by Adriana Bogaard) and costumes (Charlotte Reid).

One of the strengths of John McDermott’s film is that it breaks the rock-doc mold by not relying on a starry roster of talking heads.

There’s a satisfying balance between biography and pop-culture history.

In terms of dramatic oomph, the problem isn’t that everyone behaves with decency and compassion, but that everyone unfailingly says what they mean, robbing the movie of moment-to-moment friction, dimension and subtext, even as its lessons in gratitude and self-forgiveness hit the mark.