Warren Cantrell

An interesting, original concept combined with solid acting and creative directing propel “Stray” and keep its audience invested throughout its tidy 81-minute run-time.

Tense, relatable, and cut from a familiar narrative cloth, Rust Creek manages to overcome a few character and pacing issues to emerge as a quality thriller.

An interesting, but ultimately light and frothy, Parisian rom-com that flies by at a breezy 73 minutes, A Faithful Man does alright for itself despite a few baked in flaws.

On the one hand, director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen should be commended for adhering to the verité sensibilities of the project, as “Wilderness” never comes across as curated or guided. Yet this does keep the doc from probing into the more interesting questions and considerations that sit just under the surface here, such as the fundamental “why” of all of this.

Solid performances, a clever conceit, and technical over-competence behind the camera bolster what is ultimately a predictable and sometimes unpleasant viewing experience.

Interesting, funny, yet thin where it matters most, Tunnard’s film is nevertheless a good indication of promising work ahead.

Cousins is insightful, thorough in his technical comparisons, and well-read in the library of cinema, yet never quite connects his work to a larger tapestry that extends the form.

An interesting if somewhat incomplete horror thriller with decent performances, “The Changeover” is nevertheless hampered by a script that doesn’t seem to know how to connect all its narrative dots.

Mirren is magnificent as the fading mother losing her fight against the inevitable, and Winslet wisely leans on this, as well as the other reliable performances from her overqualified cast.

The Man in My Basement is a slow burn, to be sure, and though things come out fully cooked, there’s little flavor and more flash than sizzle.

A halfway interesting story with a few too many ideas and a lack of tonal cohesion.

While there is always value in highlighting the importance of empathy and good temperament in a leader, there’s nothing inherently vital or fresh about what’s seen in The Way I See It.

Uneven pacing and an anemic plot hamstring the film, which has a couple of interesting ideas yet precious few about how to convey them to its audience.

The gore is top-notch, and things take a turn for the better in the last 25 minutes, yet it’s not enough to save the movie, which is decidedly not good, no matter what the octopus drummer-lovers in your life might tell you.

Hampered by a character growth problem, tonal inconsistencies, shoddy mime work, and a collective French accent trainwreck, the film fumbles the few opportunities it does have at something better.

Pleasant enough to look at but impossible to care about, this movie isn’t bad because it fails at what it sets out to do, but because of the most evil of all reasons: it never figures out its reason to be at all.

Somewhat ironically, like the social unrest that underpins much of the footage featured in Riotsville, U.S.A., the documentary is well-intentioned yet hampered by a lack of direction, clearly defined goals, and the support of a larger, established apparatus to lend it legitimacy.

Without more from the characters, it just doesn’t come together. Merlant does shoot it all well, though, and keeps things moving so that the audience has little time to ponder the moral implications of what’s going on. This is a dubious plaudit, perhaps, yet one of the few available to Mi Iubita, Mon Amour.

Maybe one day folks will come around to “Mother Schmuckers” as something so sincerely and unintentionally terrible that’s it’s worth watching if only as a joke, yet even that is a longshot.

Hyper-violent and narratively undercooked, the film represents a creative nadir for pretty much everyone involved and manages something even Ritchie usually avoids: boredom.

While a few fun martial arts scenes pepper the effort, they are subsumed by an overall product that is riddled with plot holes, choppy cuts, laughable acting, and villains so evil that they’d make Skeletor blush.

Lacking any thematic direction or narrative momentum, the film wanders around like so many Muscovite strays on the streets of Russia: aimless yet not exactly lost. A tough sit on top of all this, and lacking anything resembling a coherent point, this one should be shot into space without a return trajectory.