William Goss

Faults is a strangely funny, often eerie accomplishment, and it’s a testament to why people like us tend to call first features like this “promising.”

Like the best of fiction, it conveys greater truth about coming to terms with the world at large, and regardless of whether each individual scene is ultimately justified in its inclusion, the cumulative impact of seeing something resembling a life unfold over a mere two hours and forty minutes is overwhelming.

There’s no denying the lovingly recreated production and costume design, all curved corners and wide lapels, and the era’s sexual politics and self-help movement are slyly incorporated as well... However, the droll humor on hand is more hit-or-miss.

What really sells both the fashionable remove and generational paralysis is the pairing of Elliott and McNulty, as they effortlessly establish a passive-aggressive relationship from the get-go that thrives in a constant state of reliably unreliable codependence.

If the Favreau-written “Swingers” concerned itself with the pursuit of meaningful romance and the Favreau-directed “Made” tackled the pursuit of a better living, then the slight if continually amusing Chef is clearly his paean to rekindling one’s passions, whether as an artist, a husband or a father.

RoboCop has sound and fury to spare and even an inspired idea or two lurking beneath that polished exterior, but much like its upgraded namesake, this watchable mess ultimately lacks a prime directive to call its own.

I’ve given A Field in England two tries now and each time found it to be occasionally ferocious and funny, severely trippy for stretches and at times outright tedious. With that said, I still can’t wait to see what the man does next.

Monuments certainly isn’t unbearable to watch, but for all its quality pedigree and good intentions, the result is a frustratingly flat film that drifts from moment to moment with a curious lack of urgency and an overbearing sense of self-importance.

Sprawling between plot lines and shifting between tones for longer than it ought to, but laden with enough pockets of truth to make you wish it had been better, more restrained, more disciplined, more trusting in its own emotional sensitivity to spare us all manner of dorky detours.

The Trip to Italy is plenty enjoyable for fans of the first one and these two, but by the end, it also has the consistency of reheated comfort food.

Good luck finding a modern martial-arts epic that can even hold a candle to it.

This long-distance love story is comfort food in any language, perfectly agreeable and unlikely to surprise.

With its painfully plain-spoken conflicts and eventually oversold gestures of kindness, Camp X-Ray may offer frustratingly little insight into the hazy world of wartime morality, but if nothing else, it suggests that Stewart may escape her own “Twilight”-shaped prison yet.

A masterfully queasy blend of dark humor and darker humanity.

Ultimately seems at war with itself, torn between its duties as an entertaining, engaging movie and a somber, sincere memorial, and in splitting the difference, the film effectively assaults its audience almost as aggressively as its subjects.

While hardly insightful as a character study, Tracks can’t help but flourish as an Aussie travelogue, with cinematographer Mandy Walker doing justice to these vast and harsh environments.

Driven by Paul Grabowsky’s deceptively jaunty score, Swerve is ably performed and tightly paced... But it doesn’t stick the landing.

Philomena honors its namesake by valuing potent understatement over potential hysterics.

A potent encapsulation of how fame and finance beget fear and grief.

Steady-handed action is enough to elevate this film above its predecessor.

As the rare overlap between music doc and advocacy piece, Musicwood is hopeful about a relatively unsung issue without necessarily being naïve.

Teller manages a careful enough balance between painstaking technique and a larger cultural context over 80 brisk minutes to make even minor revelations feel like major moments.

A superb tearjerker in between beautiful bluegrass ballads.

Last Love hardly presents itself as a challenging picture, tugging as it does at the heartstrings with gentle persistence, but at its best moments, it is a sweetly considered one.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

Alas, despite the timeless concerns of adolescent bullying and burgeoning sexuality, Carrie as a film fails to become its own satisfyingly whole interpretation of coming-of-age horrors both literal and figurative. Its bloodshed may be all dressed up, but it ultimately has nowhere to go.

All the horror hallmarks do little to compensate for a dearth of genuine scares or surprises, and DiBlasi’s workmanlike approach isn’t distinctive enough to transcend the script’s clichés.

More focused and less preachy than its exploitation-riffing predecessor, the comparably shoddy Machete Kills nonetheless peters out in the homestretch (and, for some, surely sooner).

Among the stronger American horror films of the year.

Should satisfy the planet of b-boys and girls to whom it preaches.

Under the Skin is a deliberately oblique piece of work that prizes rhythms and textures above hows and whys.

Fiennes and writer Abi Morgan mercifully forsake the gee-golly traditions of similar fame-minded fare...in constructing a narrative as emotionally repressed as its subjects must have been, with each character existing within their own arena of personal and social compromise.

The fact that Cuarón’s film strives to be something more than thoroughly harrowing — no small feat in and of itself — solidifies its existence as a marvel of not just technical craft but sheer imagination as well

Backtracking dilutes the few simple jolts that actually work.

Rarely a moment is ever wasted, a consequence ignored, and though the climax is a corker, the final shot is even better. Prisoners requires and rewards your attention in equal measure. Be ready.

Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s Labor Day is as consistently assured a piece of filmmaking as any we’ve seen from the filmmaker and very much in keeping with the decreasingly glib nature of his output.

Ejiofor’s tightly clenched conviction perfectly embodies hope and righteousness against all odds. He gives the best performance of his career to date, and what’s more, he gives “Slave” its bruised, beating heart with every scene.

Moore’s movie may not seem to make much sense...but he does set up bits at the beginning that do come to pay off in ridiculous ways, and cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham pulls off the commendable feat of shooting the film with some margin of legitimate composition in spite of the crew’s apparent guerrilla antics.

Frankly, no one in this ensemble is done any favors by Jason Hall and Barry Levy’s screenplay, a “Duplicity” for dummies filled to the brim with double-crossing cliches.

Faithful to the superficial thrills and flaws of the original.

A visually colorful but otherwise vanilla continuation of the series.

A.C.O.D. proves to be both a solid debut for Zicherman and a worthy vehicle for Scott and company, one that provides plenty of awkward laughs and generally gives the American farce a good name again.

It’s the odd touch of local color — like the backdrop of an abandoned amusement park, or the arrival of a Civil War steamer crewed by Confederate zombies — that makes these routine acts of derring-do a bit easier to bear.

Frankly, Elysium is a bit of a liberal’s wet dream: the good guys want accessible healthcare, while the bad guys want to do away with undocumented immigrants.

The premise is provoking and well-conceived, confidently moving things forward until the increasingly knotty rules of the film’s universe eventually come to overbear the experience a bit in the homestretch.

Burdge is left to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of inviting the audience into her protagonist’s shaky state, and her performance boasts a remarkable emotional precision throughout — if ever there’s a reason to seek this one out, it would be for her.

In a season stuffed with empty eye candy, 2 Guns comes along as something of a welcome burrito — plenty satisfying and hardly nutritious.

Much like Brandy, “List” tries and tries and tries to get the job done, but frankly, the satisfaction only ever comes in spurts.

A knowing take on movies and maturity alike, The World’s End is just as thoroughly thoughtful as those which came before it, and maybe more than ever, you’ll find yourself laughing to keep from crying.

Every double-cross and ticking clock is familiar in the worst ways.

Europa Report doesn’t entirely sell out to convention by the end, but the steps it takes to reach its noble conclusion reflect a lack of imagination and invention, especially for a film that initially seems to champion such qualities.

Wan has marshaled his crack sense of supernatural menace into making his most satisfying scare story yet.

The fact that Johnny Depp alone gets top billing above the title, The Lone Ranger, despite not playing said character sums up the generally misguided approach taken by Depp and the creative crew behind the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise in bringing last century’s radio and TV hero back to the big screen in a big way.

Given Garant and Lennon’s background on “The State” and “Reno 911,” their scattershot approach as filmmakers isn’t especially surprising; for every oddly specific Shakespeare reference or detour to the local po-boy joint, there’s an ongoing parade of puke and an awful rubber suit with which to contend.

At best, White House Down is a sure-fire way to kill two hours, if not countless brain cells.

Maniac is a bit like watching an amputee play hopscotch: there’s no way that it’s polite to stare for this long, but you just have to see if this guy’s gonna make it to the end.

It’s minor LaBute, but nonetheless short and bittersweet.

So self-conscious that it alienates the viewer early and often.

A well-polished production with a remarkable soundtrack.

An efficient and effectively exciting globe-spanning zombie thriller.

In fact, The Internship rivals the aggressively bland “Larry Crowne” for sheer tepidness, if not worse due to the exhaustive product placement for a company whose real-life presence is unlikely to soon wane.

Occupies an odd middle ground between their Apatow-produced bromances, the giddy gruesomeness of the recent “Aftershock” and the confined social abrasiveness of “It’s a Disaster.”

Wish You Were Here goes to a dramatically gripping place of guilt and doubt; if only its grip had held just a bit tighter.

The film itself is sly and smug in kind, fleetingly enjoyable for all of its old-school showmanship and high-tech hokiness.

Not as touching or boldly transgressive as its ultra-violent peers.

The beats and trappings are all standard-issue, but the gags are funny enough, often enough, to offset such routine proceedings.

In the end, his (Luhrmann) Gatsby takes the fitting form of a cocktail glass, at once undeniably polished and unfailingly empty.

Two Buckleys for the price of one, but the real star here is Penn Badgley.

Downey, Jr. remains a rightfully cherished smartass figure, having as much a ball with Black’s one-liners as he had in “KKBB,” and he sells Tony’s newfound post-traumatic vulnerability more credibly than the film does.

In a film about how hard it is to know what you want, and then to express it, Swanberg gets to the heart of the matters of the heart with disarming doses of both charm and wisdom.

Subtlety is hardly at home here, with Quaid’s especially earnest performance a well-suited mask for Henry’s desperation that nonetheless amplifies the phoniness of the entire enterprise.

The film’s final shot ranks among its least graphic and yet most puzzling, a slap-in-the-face piece of punctuation that reminds the most accommodating viewers that, even on his good days, Mr. Zombie is really only making movies for an audience of one.

Glaringly indebted to several earlier works and the film overall remains beholden to one established brand above all others: Tom Cruise.

Prince Avalanche occupies a strange space between [Green's] broadly comedic fare and devoutly character-driven dramas, and while we’re happy to see him closer to the latter mode once more, let’s hope that he’ll be back in a bigger way the next time out.

A funny, sly directorial debut

[Brie Larson's] performance is something of a quiet revelation, and in turn, the same could be said of the film itself.

At first, it’s all fun and games whenever somebody gets hurt, but that’s not enough in and of itself to sustain the movie’s tension. We’re left waiting for characters to die off without much of a vested interest in anyone’s survival.

From the concept on down, Cronenberg’s film inevitably resembles the ‘80s body horror with which father David made his name, but Brandon brings his own antiseptic eye to this queasy noir mutation, like “D.O.A.” for a self-serving near-future.

By any measure, 'Temptation' ranks amongst Tyler Perry's worst.

The downright gnarliest mainstream horror release in recent memory, Evil Dead is certainly a considerable and occasionally commendable dose of the ol’ ultra-violence, but Fede Alvarez’ Raimi-sanctioned update of 1981’s cult favorite only really has that demented determination going for it.

Like the back half of its namesake, Wonderstone isn’t terribly hip, edgy or new itself, just amusing enough to pass the time. While Scardino and friends do manage to end the film on an admirably nutty note, this gathering of comedic minds ultimately fails to produce any true movie magic.

As emblematic of the film’s general indifference as anything is Driver’s central, perfectly fine performance.

Even at thirty seconds a piece, 26 shorts would feel, fittingly, like overkill. The ABCs of Death has no shortage of inventive, ironic and gruesome sketches, but the novelty of its successes just barely outweighs its stillborn stuff.

Actions do have their consequences, though, and Weitz doesn’t try to end things too tidily for their own good. Were only that he had succeeded in committing to one of those films over the other, then Admission might have been this year’s “Liberal Arts” rather than this year’s “Smart People.”

At the end of the day, it’s a sure-handed sequel, but not a terribly thrilling one.

Yes, surely for them, the lucky few and probable many, 21 and Over will be the Best Movie Ever. For the rest of us, though, it’s something of a chore.

The most frightening thing about the franchise at this point is that it just keeps on going, undaunted by the characteristics by which the first film made its name. Family is still family and a brand is still a brand, but the blade… well, it’s only grown dull.

Its ultimate merits may be few, but if nothing else, it stands on its own sweaty terms.

The bloodshed speaks volumes enough, though, even if it takes some time getting to the mayhem proper.

John Dies at the End is easily funnier than it is scary, and much like the drug at the center of the story, it offers one hell of a trip.

Park allows this macabre coming-of-age tale to be defined by mood and style above all else.

Before Midnight manages to be an emotionally astute and tremendously enjoyable conclusion to this rather improbable trilogy.

As willfully oblique as his first film was densely foreboding, a rumination on the perils and pleasures of interpersonal connection that would seem to refuse any easy connection with even the most curious of audiences.

Faxon and Rush’s screenplay doesn’t deviate too far from formula, but their sturdy direction, bolstered by handsome production values, evokes a wistful sense of carefree summers and conjures up a potent amount of simmering teenage angst beneath the frequent chuckles.

That Nichols is able to orchestrate this entire journey with steady tension and lyrical imagery is a testament to his storytelling capabilities.

We’re given fairly straightforward talking-head accounts complemented with an increasing amount of archival material as the narrative progresses further towards the present, all coated in a VH1-suited slickness that belies the reported funk of the studio itself. Fortunately, that slickness is in service of tales from some substantial musicians.

A mostly mundane single-father drama.

To the film’s credit, it doesn’t waste much time in doling out shadowy figures and fake-outs for the gullible and easily goosed, and the cast as a whole dutifully delivers its panicked looks and cries in the night.