Vadim Rizov

Yuri Bykov’s third feature is in the same vein as a slew of recent Russian films sounding a strident alarm.

Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny.

Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden's documentary Ne Me Quitte Pas is a grimly funny deep dive into sustained alcoholism with a classical three-act structure.

Constantly just dodging visual cliché, Sutton tries to isolate moments of beauty and frustration within a specific milieu. Sometimes he captures resonant moments in bars and in stray dialogue; other times, his purposelessness seems less like a strategy and more like an evasive feint.

Its fascinations compromised by its clunkiness, the film is a necessary niche history that serves well enough as a primer, placing it just a cut above coasting on good intentions.

The technical, workmanlike production is made more irritating than necessary by Michael Hearst’s score, whose grating circus-comes-to-town sprightliness is routinely slathered over mundane footage.

The Case For Christ is pretty slow going, tedious rather than offensive, with Strobel repeatedly whiteboarding out the evidence as callback voice-overs add up all the pieces until he’s convinced. “All right, God,” he finally says. “You win.”

Shot in widescreen in New Orleans, this new Benji looks burnished and luxe in comparison with the visibly threadbare original, to which it pays several nods for the fans.

Turns out to be a disappointingly standard-issue addiction melodrama, this one the tearful case study of an adrenaline junkie whose compulsion threatens to push her family and loved ones away.

If this is, as he claims, indeed his last film (or at least last big narrative feature), he’s retiring with the courage of his convictions intact. If only he was expressing them more vigorously.

On the sliding scale of low expectations associated with the “I (may or may not have) slept with a famous person” biopic genre, Robin Hood is more smoothly professional and tolerable than the lowly likes of "My Week With Marilyn" or the JFK-adultery-soap opera "An American Affair."

With its autumnal, end-of-days feeling, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia ends up serving as a capably assembled but deeply felt obituary for both its title subject and the late Hitchens.

Khaou’s avoidance of visual fireworks and his attempt to barrel through his own script in such a workmanlike fashion has the side effect of letting his actors down.

Once the film hits the desert, a little before the halfway point, Jacq has the energy sucked out of him and so does the film, limping along while he repeatedly throws histrionic fits.

The Bachelor Weekend plays as expected: Characters must start close, bond during their trip, have their friendship momentarily threatened, then cathartically make up right on schedule.

X-Ray is extremely dull, and unwisely trusting in the power of its talented central duo to carry the film.

The film is competent in its framing and editing in a way that most comedies aren’t (compare/contrast with Neighbors 2, which is barely a movie except in the most technical sense) and avoids dead-end-obvious improv.

At best, The Liberator is a commendably old-fashioned affair that goes light on CGI backgrounds and heavy on dazzling scenery. At worst, it’s a reminder of all the extras-heavy would-be epics that got tossed on film history’s slag heap.

There’s little sense that these people are friends for any reason besides the script saying so, and the contrasts between the three relationships produce no real insight in this hollow, irritating drama.

There’s little analysis, in-depth history, anecdotal humor, or even well-selected gameplay clips. Ironically, Video Games: The Movie is almost no fun whatsoever.

An improvement on its predecessor insofar as it takes place in Athens rather than small-town Texas, meaning the scenery is better.

The bouts are all muddles lacking sustained choreography or a sense of trajectory, with crowd-reaction shots and sports-announcer voice-over carrying the slack.

Carano deserves better: She’s a formidable physical performer, and the current state of the MMA film on the DTV circuit is strong enough to shame this wan, drama-clogged effort.

Daniel Espinosa’s unwieldy, sometimes unintentionally funny film adaptation nails the gloomy period production design of a perpetually gray empire, but otherwise, it’s a wash, starting with a Europudding assemblage of performers of all nationalities besides Russian.

For all the good intentions and native hands behind the camera, The World Made Straight never seems particularly credible or convincing as a fresh look at regional history.

While 90 Minutes In Heaven has a professional sheen miles above the clunky products peddled by PureFlix (God’s Not Dead) and their ilk, that just makes it duller.

Inelegantly compressing the year up to the shooting, I’m Not Ashamed has more than its fair share of clunkiness.

This kind of dully formulaic filmmaking accomplishes little more than congratulating viewers for caring enough about historical atrocities to watch.