Never less than good but it's also never quite great.

We bear witness, via Brügger's film, to the slow-motion train wreck that high-echelon, African graft becomes.

It's delightfully frightful fun, a fine addition to the venerable and febrile tradition of Australian comedy-horror.

There is much pain, and any number of deeply philosophical questions posed, if not answered. This is very powerful stuff, but what you ultimately make of it will have a lot to do with the politics you bring to watching it.

Hit the Road is stuffed with thoughts, ideas, and metaphors, which can leave the film feeling weighty and thick, but for those willing to dig and see past its simplistic charms, it’s quite an ambitiously layered debut.

Even for its flaws, Captain America: Brave New World feels like the series may be finding its soul again.

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

Armie Hammer slyly steals the show as Ord, a very chill American arms dealer.

The film’s simplest pleasure is its naturalism – the illusion it creates of observing the animals undetected.

In the end, your appreciation for horror-Westerns will determine where you stand with The Pale Door. If you are willing to look past the film’s genre shortcomings and find happiness in the little things – such as Sage’s Creole accent, or several cinematic nods to iconic entries in the genre – you might find the film to be worth your while.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera.

The end result? Compassion for the (literally) poor schmuck conjoined with a genuine sympathy toward his right-minded bunglings, noodle kugel and all.

Cherry is a small-scale tragedy, one repeated over and over again in broad sweeps, but still specific to this one instance. The issue is that, when the audience knows the inevitable path, there are limited opportunities for surprises – especially since the Russos set the entire story as a flashback.

Falling in love with the wrong person makes for a far more toothsome melodrama, a fact this small, satisfying picture rightly recognizes.

It’s in how Harris depicts the seemingly psychic bond between the sisters for silent conversation. In those sequences, she plays the same kind of cunning games with layout and design that she did in the published text of the script, showing a raw ingenuity that adapts the stylistic possibilities of the stage for the more realistic setting of the screen.

Before I Fall puts all its excellent elements in service to a story that’s well-told and has a valuable lesson.

It may owe much to viral shockers like "28 Days Later," but its political and personal insight elevates The Cured alongside the best of contemporary European realism.

It's less an examination of the psyche of one man than a PSA about manipulators. As a judge is quoted as saying: If you see Michael Organ coming, run.

If von Boehm adds anything to what's known of Newton's life, it's to explore his iconography, about which he was very honest. His dismissiveness of photography as insightful, his enigmatic storytelling, and the great contradiction of his work, of how a young Jewish boy who was almost murdered during Kristallnacht absorbed so much of the imagery of the Reich's most artistic propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

The performances are superlative, as is much of the film's Jewish flavor. The ham is barely noticeable.

An Inconvenient Sequel does indeed speak truth to power, but the elephant in the room remains: The very powerful rarely pay attention to the utter truth.

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

Oddly, most of the elements needed for a good movie are present here, but when added together they equal less than the sum of the parts.

Like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) before him, Scurlock sets his sights on vast money-motivated conspiracies and doesn't rest until he finds them.

To make an intelligent heist film is difficult work; to shoot an entertaining sociological study is near impossible. To manage both at the same time has got to be some kind of minor miracle.

Robin doesn’t make a definitive statement about the science of the hunt, but after the audience gets snake-struck, staring into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll have no doubts about which species is the real mass-murdering interloper.

The humor ranges from situational gags to wordplay both clever and juvenile. Despite routine lapses into gay panic and the kind of dick-stroking shadowplay that was exhausted a decade ago by the Austin Powers franchise, there are strong laughs sprinkled throughout, culminating in an unexpectedly inspired climactic car chase.

Despite its shortcomings, Redacted is nevertheless a film brimming with spontaneity and fury, and in a season of often-ambiguous films about the war in Iraq, there is a lot to be said for this kind of combustible energy.