Delving beneath skin level and examining the mind of an 18-next-week boy, Dance Party is challenging, gritty, and true.

Eye of the Dolphin is much better than most films of this sort, and if it helps a generation of young girls want to grow up to swim with live dolphins rather than groom My Little Ponys, that's certainly not a bad thing at all.

And even if this all seems a little absurd for you, just take a degree of pleasure in seeing neo-Nazis getting brutalized by a teenage girl. That never gets old.

Those obsessed with first-person and screenlife films may want to explore Profile from a strictly technical standpoint, and they are welcome to do so. Everyone else can avoid it entirely.

Huang's understatement often seems flat. There's nothing visually distinctive about his depiction of diverse working class NYC, and major events bubble up with surprisingly little impact. With so much on the line, Boogie just sort of dribbles to nothingness.

Full of nuanced performances (Streep in particular) and wonderfully enveloping music.

Like the man to whom this film is dedicated, Ken Kesey, Gerry just wants to go "further."

If you are in the market for a movie called Cocaine Bear, all you want to know is that the premise does not jump the shark in the very first act. If nothing else, it seems that Elizabeth Banks has used Cocaine Bear as an excuse to work with several of her favorite television actors of the 2010s – and then kill them off in the most glorious way possible.

Midway through, a character remarks as he leaves the scene of a takedown of Ronnie, "I thought this was going to be funny, but it's just kind of sad." The same thing is true about the movie as a whole.

Neglects to provide the characters with enough background history to explain what makes them such original figures in the Old West.

It's mean, gritty, and brutally nihilist, its mystery unwrapping before it strangles you with its perfect meanness. If noir is about, as the old saying goes, bad people doing bad things for good reasons, then Sympathy for the Devil bleeds in all the right ways.

In the end, Blackballed doesn't take home the winner's cup, but its genial stick-to-itiveness and reasonably well-aimed humor earn the film at least a good sportsmanship trophy.

The problem in adaptation here is that Collins’ source book accessed Snow’s inner monologue, a churn of competing emotions and priorities at odds with his unruffled outer self. Without that insight, Snow’s evolution from war-scarred orphan to what Donald Sutherland is playing in the original quadrilogy is rendered as blank as, well, snow.

Whatever points The Little Things scores for a morally ambiguous ending are washed away in the hours it takes to get there.

No nectar of the gods this, but we can still be thankful that Bee Movie is a sweet morsel that's devoid of any jokes about bee farts and poop.

It's a goofy, tongue-in-cheek, my-gawd-how-could-we-be-so-dumb shrine, but a shrine nonetheless.

It's just raw, uncoated stupidity that sticks in your throat.

The battles between the imperious Hepburn and the presumed-mad Taylor are pure theatricality, while sensitive shrink Clift observes it all and emotes.

When it comes to the segments, Scare Package II is much more successful than the first film in striking a unified tone – maybe less outrageously funny, maybe a little drier, but still entertaining.

It's never wise to try to one-up a classic.

The result is a bit like seeing a Nike commercial make a drunken pass at its friend’s manga collection while the X-Files DVDs watch from across the room; it may not make much sense, but at least it’s never boring.

Veterans Eva Marie Saint and Cicely Tyson make welcome appearances.

Wilson and Beckinsale, as the couple on the rocks, do their damnedest to go along for the creepfest, but nothing in Vacancy manages to come anywhere close to the quiet and steadily mounting dread of the real thing, much less the purview of Norman Bates or his beloved mother.

Terminator: Dark Fate is personified in the Rev-9. The new terminator is a nanite skin over a combat endoskeleton. It should be two for the price of one: Instead, it's the chassis of the original draped with the flesh of Robert Patrick's "Judgment Day" liquid metal shapeshifter. It's everything you loved before, just awkwardly kludged together.

Provocative though it is, Felt literally wears its ideas on its sleeves.

Black and Blue is almost incoherently edited, dumping out chase scenes where characters round corners and enter rooms with absolutely no sense of spacing or location. That, plus a predictable number of digital squibs, prevents the film from connecting as either art or entertainment.

It's an occasionally entertaining ride, although one fraught with numerous logical holes.

We may come to Empire of Light like moths to a flame but, ultimately, the film’s glow lacks incandescence.

No offense to composer Mark Mothersbaugh (who is heavily involved in all three films) but the soundtrack is better this time around, thanks to some heavy, entrancing, villainous beats by DJ Tiësto.

What a glorious weepie The Notebook might have been if they’d just found a way to get rid of the damned notebook.

Jet Lag's romantic fluffery is somewhat beneath these old pros, but they make its meet-cute scenario work, mostly -– and most especially when crusty, grumpy, grizzled Jean Reno announces he's "totally in love."

The film doesn't have the book's detail or range, and by turns it's portentous with trumped-up melodrama or overreaches for lame comedy.

It's a 24-hour-party-people travelogue, entertaining enough to grab your eyes... but less memorable than it may at first appear.

Can someone dial down Cuba Gooding Jr. a few notches? He's so hyperactive during this MTV Films production - which is comedically indistinguishable from "Sister Act," but with more marketable music - that his Vegas-showgirl drag act in the dreadful "Boat Trip" looks like Bressonian minimalism by contrast.

To its credit, A Time to Kill allows the debate to snake through the entire movie, engagingly pitting characters and speeches against each other, creating a dramatic forum for ethical debate uncommon in most commercial American films.

Silent Night looks just a little too much like every other action movie to serve as a celebration of action auteurism.

The Dead Don’t Die feels like something of a minor comic note in the director’s curriculum vitae, but it’s not without its pleasures. And like Romero’s genre classic, social commentary, satirical and otherwise, abounds.

Rodriguez’s technical wizardry is less showy here than in his other recent outings, which helps Shorts connect with kids on a basic human level.

The film has some truly great right-wing anarchic moments, bur for the most part its politics are all too predictably – and only – militaristic, misogynist, racist, and xenophobic; for too much of its running time, it’s just a childishly simplistic masturbatory fantasy for right-wing hebephrenics that’s mostly safe enough to play the White House.

The film's sound design is also expertly wrought with a blend of nearly subliminal noises, bumps in the night, and other frights.

The lesson learned from The Tale of Despereaux is that an overabundance of vocal talent does not a good cartoon make.

The first act is very nearly unbearable, leaden and doomy and generically plotted.

The opening act, I’m sorry to report, is a mess.

The Big Year's biggest disappointment is its inadequacy in elucidating the passion of the birder. What ardency, and what an exceptional, impenetrable world they move in. I for one wanted a better look at it.

It Ends With Us pours most of its nuance into the beginning, middle, and harrowing climax of its central relationship.

Book Club isn’t a movie for me. It’s probably not a movie for you, either. Book Club was written for an audience that will find loaded references to "50 Shades of Grey" delightfully risqué.

An interesting subject does not make for a great documentary. Stuntwomen, while clean cut, has the feel of a made-for-TV edit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t wow.

It's a soggy drama said to be inspired by actual events – too serious to be trashy, too trashy to be serious.

When Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Ultimately, Prisoners of the Ghostland is an OK film by a great filmmaker who has made truly great films, most memorable for its cast and the fact Sono finally made an English-language movie. Yet, when what's noteworthy about a film is just that it exists, it's more a vapor than an actual phantom.

This film may be Korine's most accessible as a director, featuring characters, images, and situations that are stirring and unforgettable – even if they don't add up to a complete narrative or visual whole.

It's the type of film that begs to be called “charming” and by doing so instead ends up grating.

Unruly girls around the world are liable to find these Bandits stealing their hearts.

So silly, so garishly over-the-top, and so bracingly eager to please, that it's hard not to fall under its gleefully gooney spell.

This might not matter so much to the youngest members of the audience, but for anyone over the age of 10, it’s strictly a colorful bore.

The movie has a charming mix of sensible, earthbound characters and silly, over-the-top caricatures.

It’s not an altogether convincing portrait, but it is an entertaining, even moving one, and the forcefulness of Bullock's presence goes a long way in pulling the film back from the brink of cuddliness.

Comes across as a particularly unspecial "Very Special Episode" of a television series that never made it past the pilot stage.

Absolutely one-hundred-percent ridiculous, this is comedy of a higher order, and more maniacally inspired than almost anything released in years.

We never see Salazar’s performance, only the SFX team’s re-creation of her performance, and that generates a disconnect between the audience and the lead character that the film can never overcome.

On the not-much-of-a-plus side, at over two hours long, sitting through The Book Thief engenders in the viewer some serious sympathy for the interminable plight of poor, sickly Max, concealed below stairs in a dank, dark corner of the house on Himmelstrasse.

Comedic actor François Damiens mines but never mocks Markus' awkwardness, thereby creating a winning portrait in decency. His tracing, with the ever-luminous Tautou, of the slow bloom of new love is a thing of understated beauty.

The heart of the film, however, is the character played by Bene Coopersmith, a real-life record store owner in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

All in all, In the Mouth of Madness is a fun, clever horror picture, full of creepy crawlies, things that go bump in the night, and references to everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Dario Argento.

It's not really a matter of Nancy's retro look and grounding in the fundamentals of sleuthing that separates the women from the girls but, rather, this film's lack of gaiety and surprise that makes it dud for old and new generations of the books' fans.

There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.

This is basically a Whitman’s Sampler of poor taste, and a tastier one at that.

The good news, then, is that The Siege is hardly the ticking time bomb of racial slurs some would have you imagine, and the bad news is that it doesn't matter because it's all too damn pedantically serious to take seriously.

There’s no denying the poetry at work in his film, but so much of it is inchoate and fundamentally sexualized that it becomes more of a turn-off than a turn-on. Malick’s Cups is ultimately half-full.

These days, it's dark everywhere. Which makes Slade's wild, often exhilarating neo-Western ride into frostbit vampirism something of a respite, albeit one awash gore.

Woody Allen generates films with such rapidity and inconsistency that you can never be certain if this season’s offering will be a hit or a miss. I’m happy to report that Irrational Man is a delight.

Director Benny Chan has fashioned a visually sumptuous period wushu film with a strikingly contemplative and pacifist bent.

So what if it's a story we've seen already this year? It's still a blast, and with added Savage it manages to be a good-hearted cash-in that retains the original's mix of emotion and acerbic humor while providing a hilarious commentary on the film itself.

A riot of colors, Kika is sometimes sick, sometimes playful, but consistently hilarious and entertaining in ways that few films have been lately.

In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.

Despite employing every cliché in the sports-movie handbook, Goal! The Dream Begins tells a reasonably engaging story.

Inside has all the surface trappings of an arthouse hit, but don’t look too closely – there isn’t much there.

Like its images, The Promise billows through the imagination as it unfolds but it leaves little lasting impression once its last feather has fluttered.

If nothing else, 6 Years is a testament to the cohesion of the Austin filmmaking community. You can barely round a corner without seeing a familiar face or production credit.

The script never knows whether it wants to be reverential or referential, and ends up being a hodgepodge of cameos and flashbacks.

In this entertainingly tense thriller, Hebrig finds extraordinary courage and understandable fear in both the Strelzyk and Wetzels.

Prows lets all those subplots divert him from saying something meaningful about how even the best-intentioned of cops end up part of a nightmare machine. Luckily, the plentiful and creative gore splatters enough blood and ichor to provide camouflage disguising those shortcomings. Or rather, enough to make Night Patrol entertaining – just not enough to completely obfuscate what it could have been.

An essentially toothless affair, poking fun at American imperialism and its attendant cluelessness while never illuminating much beyond the obvious.

It’s not entirely clear what “generation” is the guilty one being examined in filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s third full-length documentary, but it’s safe to say that we are now several decades into the decline of Western civilization (that Creem critic was right, you guys).

Quarantine is a one-note nightmare, nicely pitched to the high-C howls of the bitten and the biters but offering considerably less froth than last year's "The Signal," which mined similar nightmares with far more fulsome results.

On the whole, the film feels detached and morose, just like its characters.

Danny Aiello and Robert Forster also turn up in tiny roles that further serve to distract attention from the real business at hand.

That is the heart of what's missing here: the buzz that unites these games and players, the seductive lure that excites as it also placates. The dramatic throughline is murky as well...Undeniably good are the performances, however.

Now, four years later, Blumhouse Productions has released an anthology sequel that follows in its footsteps. The kicker? It’s even better than the first.

Less subversive and infinitely less intelligent than 1999’s Wahlberg-starrer "Three Kings," this movie does blow lots of s--- up real good and punish contemptible public figures otherwise left unaccountable for massacring African villagers.

Neither the worst nor the best of the Conjuring franchise, Annabelle Comes Home is only as creepy as it needs to be and no more. Keep your expectations low and you might just enjoy it.

Scott’s is the story of how Robin Longstride (and, no, that’s not a name made up by Mel Brooks), an archer in Richard the Lionheart's last Crusade, became Robin of the Hood, the wily defender of the overtaxed people of Nottingham.

As a depiction of the lowest ebbs of what is written off as flyover country, Donnybrook doesn't lack for empathy for the truly unsympathetic. What is in short supply is any sense of direction.

It's a great set-up, and for the first two-thirds or so of the film it works exceptionally well as a jaundiced satire on the world of gay porn.

A warm, comfortable, thoroughly inoffensive kidfilm.

Winter can't resist the cheering idea that, for all its sins, YouTube has created a new, disseminated knowledge base. However, that core concern about its dangers is what really drives The YouTube Effect, and re-enforces its central finding that it has had an undeniably corrosive effect on our lives, even as we've fallen for its steady stream of pablum and bootlegged shows.

Flightplan should have remained grounded for repairs.

A fast-paced amoral joyride that's more interested in the absurdities of violent criminality (torture by crayfish, anyone?) than the complications of real life.