Stephen Garrett

The film’s Antarctic framing device (wait, what?) feels unearned and distracting, regardless of its veracity. But there’s plenty to behold, including a killer Gâteau Saint-Honoré.

Rockwell’s performance is impressively flinty, as is the rest of the cast (including William H. Macy delivering some twitchy character work), and the dialogue sparkles with brilliantly colorful mountain-man slang. Despite its byzantine narrative, the film remains never less than absorbing, as the walls slowly close in on this good-hearted but ultimately flawed protagonist.

Even the soundtrack is mostly on-the-nose jug-band hokum, except for one cue: a searing old-timey version of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat," courtesy of octogenarian bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley. If the rest of the movie had the same energy, spontaneity and soul, it would have been more potent than 190-proof hooch.

The deep cynicism would be depressing if it weren't so riveting.

While Unforgivable stays true to this approach, its disparate souls feel too scattershot to be interwoven into a meaningful narrative tapestry.

But make no mistake: As a movie, it's Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad: atrocious acting, amateurish camerawork and a hackneyed story line all make for one painful slog.

The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl-and-turns-heartbreak-into-great-art plot is as hoary as they come, but Mariscal's eye-popping artwork and the evocation of a bygone musical era (Charlie Parker at the Village Vanguard, Tito Puente at the Palladium) are delirious.

Both Reitman and his first-rate cast do their best to add depth. The real tragedy of Young Adult, however, is the story's lack of tragedy.

Best of all, filmmaker Bennett Miller (Capote) uses this brainiac sports movie to remind viewers that money is neither the measure of a man nor the ultimate assessment of quality; it's a myopic metric based on past accomplishments rather than future potential. After all, success isn't always about the home runs so much as just getting on base - again, and again, and again.

Lessons are learned, bullies get their comeuppance, and every Wonder Years plot device is trotted out for maximum and-I-was-never-the-same-again nostalgia.

Hobbled by contrived situations and atonal acting, The Chaperone is a lazy payday sloppily directed by Hollywood veteran Stephen Herek.

More than a few moments feel implausible or overwrought; yet the movie, about two people so desperate to be alive, is eerily haunting.

Sherman based this obtuse psychosexual dystopia on his own hippie upbringing; the result is virtually teeming with bitter resentment for the drug-addled parent collective that inadvertently turned his adolescence into a chapter from "Lord of the Flies."

Less a nightmare than a case of bad indigestion, this ’80s horror reboot is a primer in the humorless recycling of potent pop culture.

Dramatically handcuffed and smothered in overbearing mood music, this lightweight New York crime thriller is desperate to look and feel gritty; the cast, meanwhile, deliver vein-popping diatribes between clenched teeth and weep openly in a desperate ploy to earn gravitas.

What is impressive is the filmmaker’s facility with atmosphere, plus his ripe eye for giving blue-collar bruisers just enough dimension to make them more than mouth-breathing meatheads.

Numbingly simplistic in concept and execution.

This still-prescient vivisection of modern culture’s vapidity crackles with the nervous energy of midtown’s hothouse broadcasters.

Packs a forceful punch.

A film that could have been memorably haunting is, sadly, all too forgettable

Lamely tries to update "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" for the Twitter set. Too bad Truman Capote’s not around for rewrites.

What’s refreshing about Pascal-Alex Vincent’s dramatically thin but richly atmospheric feature debut is that it recognizes the essential truth of the conceit: all seminal voyages are journeys of heightened awareness, as visceral as they are emotional.

Despite a plucky soundtrack and frantic editing, the movie shows otherwise wan interest in the gaggle of faux-transgressive bad girls who bare their dulled claws at England’s establishment ethos, as though that notion alone were somehow fresh and cheeky.

As philosophically complex as it is starkly photographed, Delmer Daves's '50s frontier thriller questions heroism---mocks it and subverts it, really---before unveiling courage without celebration.

Cloud 9's plot is thin, the conflict lazy, and the resolution sudden and unsurprising. That's a shame, because stronger development in the story department might have made this film a minor sensation.

It’s truly a milquetoast Scooby Snack for pet-friendly families who thrill to computer-generated mouth movements on real-life four-legged critters.

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

There are riveting moments, especially in tastefully shot interviews with former captives, who quietly describe their physical and psychological torture.