Walter Addiego

Throughout, Croghan knows where she wants to go, but has no fresh ideas for getting there. The characters are reasonably appealing, but the jokes are mostly weak.

This is highly skilled filmmaking, but the movie is not for everybody — the relationship involves dominance and submission, sexual games played at a high pitch. This material falls short of pornographic, but still packs plenty of erotic punch.

A bonbon, not of a full-course meal. Foodies will smack their lips over many delectable shots of victuals prepared by the film's engaging protagonist, a provincial woman chosen to cook for the president of France. As a story, though, it's insubstantial - there's conflict here, but it feels perfunctory.

There’s lots of eye candy, and the pace is fast, but somehow the movie falls short. You’re forgiven if you get the idea that “Scorch Trials” suffers from “middle movie” fatigue.

What Laika achieves is an effective mixture of hyper-real and hyper-stylized, a combination that keeps “Kubo” appealing to the eye for audiences of all ages. If the film’s plotting and dialogue had measured up, “Kubo” might have been a masterpiece.

Really doesn't pay off much.

A counterfeit of a Woo movie, even though Woo himself co-produced it.

The picture is a relentless blast of color and movement that's based on the old TV show, but boils down to a supercharged version of old-time Saturday-afternoon movie serials.

It's an interesting spectacle, but not enough to carry a movie.

So there’s talent on view here, but in service of a questionable proposition, with the whole thing tiptoeing toward the exploitative. It would be nice to see Mascaro try his hand at less volatile material.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

It would be wrong to say Close’s performance in The Wife is wasted, but it certainly deserves a better movie.

Costner’s performance is mostly monotone, but Harrelson has some nice moments portraying Gault as surprisingly reflective.

An old-fashioned and family-friendly comedy.

Mainly for those who already know and like Jodorowsky’s work.

The film refuses to soft-pedal Dickinson’s heartbreaking descent into bitterness and near-misanthropy, but sometimes operates with a heavy-handedness that’s certainly at odds with her poetry.

Like Someone in Love is best suited to viewers already familiar with this extraordinary filmmaker's better work.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.

There's no getting around it. Though it's not without virtues, The Loneliest Planet may try the patience of even the most dedicated lovers of art film.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

His personal efforts are praiseworthy, but if glacial melting is in fact the "canary in the climate coal mine" (his words), the movie might have given us a bit less of Balog and a bit more of the startling sequences he produced.

Francis Ford Coppola's Jack has its affecting moments, but in the end illustrates the pitfalls of the "concept" movie, the kind you can boil down to a one-line hook.

The film raises significant questions about manhood and offers a few gripping sequences, but isn’t fully satisfying.

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

the movie comes perilously close to implicitly justifying the killing that sparked the plot - a killing, by the way, that is close to senseless.

Besides some fine dogfight sequences, it often feels threadbare, just an exercise in recycling.

Capably made but simplistic story.

The film is beautiful but troubled, achieving in stretches the director's signature dreamy mood but dragged down by narrative confusions.

The film is well acted, with especially strong work by Alonso and Zegers. And director Larraín has a powerful knack for depicting human monsters. But he stacks the deck so heavily that at times the film can seem like simple-minded anti-clericalism, and at least some viewers are bound to resist.

The film never quite overcomes a slightly stodgy quality.

Nostalgia for the groves of academe weighs heavily on Liberal Arts, which both exploits and undermines romanticized memories of campus life.

While recognizably Ceylan's work, is more of a genre piece - a noirish suspense film - and less successful.

I'll stick out my neck and say that Park Chan Wook's wildly gruesome Thirst is the most whacked-out version of an Emile Zola novel ever to reach the screen.

Congratulations to director Mick Jackson and writers Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray for liberating themselves from the tedious demands of believability.

To be sure, Censored Voices can hardly be seen as anything but a political document, one that shares Oz’s views.

Occasionally funny and touching, but often embarrassing and cringe-inducing.

There’s something to be said for simply watching Blanchett at work. Without the contribution of this exceptionally talented actress, Manifesto would be rough going indeed. With it, the film rises — barely — above the category of “enough already.”

Although it’s good to have a critical accounting of his role in modern American politics, most of what we see here has been reported elsewhere, and this documentary seems aimed at rallying the troops.

Though short on subtlety, A Walk on the Moon does offer the consolation of some decent performances.

Director Abdullah Oguz gives us lots of nice scenery, but the simplistic story and characters strain credibility. What's more, the climactic plot turn is as hokey as it gets.

It's the story of a young married couple undone by a family tragedy, but the film loses its way, at one point turning into a political harangue.

Joner is a capable actor, but he’s required here to remain for such a long time in a one-note condition of mental fragility that our sympathy for the character starts to give way to exasperation.

In the end, there’s some naughty, voyeuristic fun to be had from Studio 54, but the bottom-line story of the club — assuming that is of value — is still to be told.

The New Zealand feature Boy almost pulls off the trick of merging cartoonish humor and '80s pop culture with a story glancing at deeper family issues. The film has an appealing 11-year-old hero, but in the end feels half baked.

It doesn’t really add up, either as a psychological portrait or moral commentary.

By showing so many examples of his art, the film attests to Giger’s real gift for startling images. But it’s hard not to see, in addition, elements of repetitive adolescent provocation.

Do Not Resist amounts to little more than a grab bag. Viewers looking for depth will have to find it elsewhere.

There seems to be a pretty good film lurking around inside Bullhead, which makes what we actually see on the screen all the more frustrating.

The comedy-drama is worth seeing for Christie's performance as a former B-actress married to a philandering handyman. She radiates a mature sexuality that's a rare treat on screen these days, and when the camera strays from her, you want to reach over and turn it back.

It could have been something substantial.

Has compelling stretches, but the film's formal concerns overwhelm the storytelling.

It’s all so heavy-handed that it’s hard to stay engaged with the movie.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

Short on complexity and depth, The Divine Order gives us a parade of heroines and villains. Instead of raising questions, it seems to want to induce in viewers a sense of smugness.

By the end you can't help but wonder whether it was a good idea to keep the youngsters under camera scrutiny for more than 12 years.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

You can't help cheering for Selena, but the good feeling is diminished by the sense that her story's been simplified and sanitized.

Ronin shows the mark of a veteran hand and is entertaining in fits and starts.

Not up to Ozon's standards.

Spiritually it's a John Woo-George Romero-Jim Thompson picture, outrageously bloody and weird.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.

If you want lots of Will Smith and industrial-strength special effects, the movie delivers.

The tales are worthwhile, but it's challenging to find a common thread among them that goes beyond vague generalities.

This tale of a young rape victim further brutalized by officialdom never lives up to its potential.

A fast-moving Congolese crime thriller loaded with graphic sex and violence - basically an exploitation picture. But it's hard to surrender to the gritty flow because the story is stitched together from such crushingly familiar bits.

Despite a super-dark noir plot and respectable cast, Deadfall is a thriller that never quite delivers on its promise.

The film finally seems to stagger under the weight of its own significance.

The idea is intriguing - an inflatable sex doll comes alive and experiences the world with wide-eyed innocence - but Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Air Doll" is only partly successful. The film's poignant depiction of human loneliness is undercut by saccharine notes and a drifting tone.

The film is implicitly advocating a New Age or holistic perspective, with a dollop of Eastern religion added for good measure. (The title is Sanskrit meaning "wheel of life.")

While the film raises simple but deeply puzzling questions about memory and identity, the hit-or-miss search for answers by the subject and assorted experts, family and friends is finally unsatisfying.

There are some compelling performance moments, and it's sad to watch these talented and basically nice people drift apart. But overall the film seems like a collection of bits and pieces, and it's hard to see how it could have much resonance for non-fans.

Because he made "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), there will always be high expectations for a new film by Michel Gondry. But while his new movie The We and the I, is intriguing in fits and starts, it isn't in the same league.

At 126 minutes the movie is excruciatingly long, but it is still too short to pack in all the subtle changes in character he means but fails miserably to convey.

Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.

The film is good enough to inspire viewers to learn more about Fela, but it should be better than that.

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

A film that's hard to watch and hard to recommend.

A melancholy Spanish drama that’s competently made and checks off all the boxes defining a contemporary art-house movie. But it lacks the spark that separates top-of-the-line films from the pack, and watching it becomes something of a slog.

Not sure we need to know this much about his family life.

In Amigo, a story of the Philippine-American War, veteran filmmaker John Sayles allows his political convictions to get the better of him. The movie is a heavy-handed attack on U.S. imperialism with little to compensate in the way of character interest and genuine drama.

I liked this movie somewhat, even if I'm not sure exactly what it means. Possibly it has something to do with arriving home, in the broadest sense. But in a Maddin film, uncertainty comes with the territory.

Too much of what we see feels contrived and ham-handed.

It's a sumptuously mounted melodrama that aims to make a big statement about big themes, but a stilted quality in the filmmaking drags it down.

It serves up a broad humanistic lesson with absurdism and black comedy more sad than barbed.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

You may experience Visitors as more of a sedative than a punch in the guts.

Painfully sincere but tired.

There are “gotcha” jolts that definitely got me, but for each of those, there must be a half-dozen scares telegraphed in very large letters. I think Annabelle: Creation is suffering from sequelitis.

At its best, Gordon's work is bracing and pointed, though it's not for the queasy.

Maybe the film works best as nostalgia for Baby Boomers who recall the picture from their childhood.

The plot is somewhat pedestrian and the dialogue needs more zip. But it's amusing to watch the Bayaka poke good-natured fun at the gangly Larry, who has only their best interests at heart.

This splatter film is set in Norway, but rest assured, it sticks with the formula. The young people to be killed off are just as obnoxious as their counterparts in American gorefests.

Tries too hard to be even-handed.

By the time the women pull off their climactic stunt, the film's been undone by its ungainly mix of heavy-handed comedy and melodrama.

The particulars of the plot don't make a great deal of sense, but Hartley's films have much more to do with style, or rather a philosophical refusal to show emotional involvement.

Some scenes are mild fun, but the mishaps that befall our hero aren't especially inventive, and although the South African setting provides a bit of interest, it's never really used incisively.